“Winn – Briony.” He used her given name deliberately. He didn’t remember doing so before. He needed some way to signal to her that he was desperate. “I really need to talk to you.”
The fact that she didn’t come back with another quip told him she was at least taking him seriously.
“I’m off shift in four hours.”
He didn’t have four hours. He could no longer remember the name of the bitch in the Second Chance Saloon.
“Now. Before I forget what I’m going to say. Or the rest of my life will be a total waste.”
“You’ll have to clear it with Admiral Wellinsky. But I don’t think he’s going to put up with any more delays.”
Wellinsky? What would that pompous son of a bitch be doing on board?
He groaned. The Parken Random Calibration Unit test run. The PRCU was Wellinsky’s pet project.
Better to risk blowing the drives on the Versatile than on one of the Fleet’s better ships. If the unit didn’t work and the Versatile had to sit in spacedock for months for repairs, no great loss. At least, not to Wellinsky.
He glanced at the data on Winnie’s console. A strange lightheadedness washed over him. Wellinsky’s voice bellowed at him through his comm badge but the hand that moved in extreme slow motion to tap at it in response didn’t feel like it was his. The air around him felt thick as Suralian honey soup.
“I’m waiting on your release code, Macawley!”
Release code. A safety procedure. The captain and the XO had release codes to be entered at separate stations before the test could begin.
“Ten seconds, Macawley!”
Seconds. Seconds. The word echoed in his mind.
I said you get a second chance at love. I didn’t say you can pick up your life right where you left off .
A woman’s voice, sultry, soothing.
He felt his eyes move slowly towards Briony Winn. She hadn’t spoken. Then who? Whose voice was that?
His fingers touched his comm badge and he snapped back into the present. “Acknowledged, Admiral.”
Hell, that was the last time he was having Oysters Galafar for a late-night snack. Felt like he was going to keel over there for a moment.
He reached for the console, keyed in his codes, saw the PRCU initialization sequence scroll down the screen. Then a flurry of activity around him as the experimental-matter conversion system came online.
Time to get back to the bridge. He didn’t trust Wellinsky’s tinkerings, but the chief would handle the problems – and he knew there’d be problems – as they surfaced. Plus Winnie was on duty. Whatever Chief Damaris Lagronde couldn’t tackle directly he knew Lieutenant Winn would solve, albeit in some wildly unorthodox manner.
He pushed himself out of the chair and nodded to Lagronde, who was already frowning. But something made him stop just before he reached the corridor. He turned, saw the stout woman leaning over Winnie’s shoulder, talking to her.
Talking to her. What was it he had to talk to Winnie about?
He shook off an inexplicable sense of edginess and strode briskly for the lifts.
He had just stepped onto the command deck when his existence shifted again.
Love. A woman’s voice. That woman’s voice. The one thing left on your to-do list.
Winnie. He didn’t tell Winnie he loved her.
He did an about-face, reached for the lift pad.
“Commander Macawley, the Admiral’s waiting for you.”
Gods damn it! He spun on the young ensign in the corridor, fist clenched. He didn’t have time for the Admiral’s petty experiments.
The young man stepped back quickly. Mac reined in his emotions. Yes, the crew knew what he was like. Knew he was an unmitigated bastard who trampled over people’s feelings like a gelzrac on a rampage. Three months and they already knew it.
So did Winnie. Because he’d brutally trampled over her feelings last night. Then downed a bottle of Pagan Gold and a dozen spiced oysters to ease the pain.
He knew now why he was here. And why he had to apologize. And why if he didn’t in the next few hours, he’d never be able to. He had to get back down to engineering.
“Tell the Admiral I’ll monitor the test run with Chief Lagronde.”
“Sir, I don’t think he’ll agree to that.”
“It’s not your job to think!” he almost barked at the young man, but stopped. He had to do more than just apologize to Winnie. He had to change everything about himself. Starting now.
“No, Ensign. I’m sure he won’t. And I’m sorry to put you in the line of direct fire.” He twisted his mouth into a wry grin. “But the Admiral’s less my concern than this ship is. Help me out here. I’ll owe you one.”
He admired the young man’s ability to prevent his jaw from dropping. But it did take him three attempts to get out a stuttered: “Yes, sir!”
The lift, uncharacteristically, appeared when summoned. He stepped in and, for fifteen shimmying seconds, leaned his forehead against the slick metal wall. A sense of disorientation returned. Damn those oysters!
The doors opened and he trudged towards engineering, shaking his head. He just left here. But had to come back, for some reason, some important reason.
Which he couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter because when he stepped over the hatch-tread, all hell broke loose.
“Chief, we’ve got a full system lock-up starting in the starboard feed!” Winnie’s voice carried clearly over the discordant beeping of alarms.
Mac sprinted to her station. Lagronde came puffing up behind him, swearing.
“Gods damn him! Gods damn that asshole, Wellinsky!” The stout woman glared at the data cascading down the console screen, then turned, startled, towards Mac.
“Macawley? Thought you went back up.”
“I did. But then I remembered something.” He slid into the seat next to Winnie’s. And recognized the slight skewing in the initialization sequence codes. He’d seen it once before, but only in a sim at the academy.
“You don’t want to see this in real life. Ever,” his aged professor had growled.
He was looking at it now. “We’ve got a breakdown—”
“In the anti-matter core slough,” Winnie finished for him. Her fingers flew over her console.
“A shutdown will rupture us.” Lagronde yanked the datapad from her utility belt, keyed in her own commands. She slapped it into an open terminal port. “Containment field activated,” she hollered over the din.
“You picked a bad time to go slumming,” Winnie said to him as Lagronde hurried away. Her voice was light but he clearly heard an undercurrent of pain. And knew it wasn’t related to their present somewhat critical situation.
“Actually, no. I always wanted to see a real core-slough failure. The sims just don’t seem to have the same urgency.” He picked up on the modification she was entering on her console, nodded in approval.
Then keyed in a few adjustments of his own.
She hazarded a glance in his direction, arched an eyebrow. “I never thought dying down here with the black shoes was on the top of your to-do list. You strike me as more of the ‘in the arms of a beautiful woman’ type.”
Her console beeped twice. “I didn’t ask for your opinion!” she told it and entered another sequence. It quieted.
His mind hung for a moment on her words. His list. His to-do list. They were a regular item already: Mighty Macawley’s To-Do Lists.
What was it that topped his to-do list?
Not dying on the Versatile. Even in the sim, he’d not been able to stop the disintegration of the slough.