“I just think everything should be clear and understood right from the beginning. It only makes sense to put a business arrangement in a contract.”
“I was just offering to help out.”
Sula laughed. “I get offers of that sort every week. And most of them are better than yours.”
A massive exaggeration, but one she decided was justified under the circumstances.
Sula also decided she should exit before Foote regrouped. She gave his sleeve a pat of mock consolation and strolled through the open door into the dining room.
Except for Parker and his companion, the guests had climbed from beneath the table. The band was making a lot of noise. Sula sat at her place, reached for her sparkling water, and discovered that someone had spiked it with what seemed to be grain alcohol.
These youngsters and their hijinks, she thought wearily.
For a moment she thought about downing the drink and chasing it with her untouched champagne. The idea had a certain attractive gaiety to it. She remembered the person she’d been the last time she was drunk and smiled. These people wouldn’t like that person at all.
The problem was, she wouldn’t either.
She put the glass back on the table, and a moment later knocked it and its contents into the lap of the person next to her.
“Oh, so sorry,” she said. “Would you like a match?”
“Signal from Flag, my lord,” Martinez said. “Second Division, alter course in echelon to two-two-seven by one-two-zero relative, and accelerate at two-point-eight gravities. Commence movement at 27:10:001 ship time.”
“Comm, acknowledge,” Tarafah said. He sat in his rotating acceleration couch in the middle of the command center.
The padded rectangular room was unusually quiet, with the lighting subdued in order not to compete with the glowing pastel lights of the various station displays, green and orange and yellow and blue. Through the open faceplate of his helmet Martinez could smell the machine oil that had recently relubricated the acceleration cages, all mixing with the polymer plastic scent of the seals of his vac suit.
From his couch behind the captain’s, he observed that Tarafah’s body was so rigid with tension that the rods and struts of the acceleration cage vibrated in sympathy with his taut, quivering limbs.
“Yes, Lord Elcap,” Martinez said, using the accepted shorthand for Tarafah’s grade, which came more easily than “Lieutenant Captain” to a Fleet officer in a hurry.
Tarafah stared at his displays, one muscle working in his cheek, visible because he hadn’t put on his helmet, a breach of procedure permitted in a captain but scarcely anyone else. Gazing at his displays, he had the attitude of a footballer deep in concentration on an unfamiliar playbook. Martinez figured that Tarafah was desperate not to wreck the assigned maneuver, which was a greater possibility than usual since so many of his top petty officers—the noncommissioned officers who were the backbone of his crew—were useless dunces.
Fortunately, Martinez had only one such dunce in his own division, Signaler First Class Sorensen, otherwise known asCorona’s star center forward. It wasn’t that Sorensen wouldn’t learn his official duties—he seemed cheerful and cooperative, unlike some of the other players—but that he seemed incapable of understanding anything the least bit technical.
No, Martinez thought, that wasn’t exactly true. Sorensen was perfectly capable of understanding the complex series of lateral passes that Tarafah had built into the Coronas’ hard-charging offense, and all that was technical enough—and besides, Martinez took his hat off toanyone who could understand the intricacies of custom, interpretation, and precedent that made up the Fleet League’s understanding of the offside rule. It was just that Sorensen couldn’t understand any complexities beyond football, to which he seemed dedicated by some unusually single-minded force of predestination.
All that wouldn’t have mattered so much if Sorensen hadn’t been promoted past Recruit First Class. But Tarafah had wanted to boost his players’ pay beyond the hefty under-the-table sums he was doubtless handing them, so he’d promoted eight of his first-string players to Specialist First Class. No doubt he would have promoted them to Master Specialist if that rank hadn’t required an examination that would have exposed a complete ignorance of their duties.
Leaving aside the senior lieutenant, Koslowski, who despite playing goalkeeper seemed a competent enough officer, there were ten additional first-string players, plus an alternate—the second alternate being an officer cadet fresh from a glorious playing season at Cheng Ho Academy. To these were added a coach in the guise of a weaponer second class, all of which made up a lot of dead weight in a crew of sixty-one.
Thus it was that Martinez discovered what Captain Tarafah meant when he said he wanted the entire ship’s company to pull together. It meant that everyone else had to do the footballers’ jobs.
He could have coped easily enough if it meant covering for the genial but inept Sorensen. But because Tarafah was consumed with football, and the Premiere, as well, he had to do much of Koslowski’s work, and even some of the captain’s. And sometimes stand their watches as well as his own. And this during a period in which football wasn’t even in season. Martinez dreaded the time when the games actually started.
He enviedCorona’s second officer, Garcia. A small, brown-skinned woman, she wasn’t a suitable footballer, and she spoke with a provincial accent almost as broad as his own, but she’d got herself in with the captain as, in effect, First Fan. She’d organized the nonfootballer crew to attend and cheer for the Coronas at the games, and made up signs and banners and threw parties in the players’ honor. Thus, she had worked her way into the captain’s circle, though she was also obliged to keep her own watch and do her own work, and probably a little of the premiere’s as well.
“Pilot, rotate ship,” Tarafah said. A little ahead of time, Martinez thought, since the other ships in the division hadn’t rotated yet, but no harm done.
“Rotating ship,” called Pilot/Second Anna Begay, who was doing the job of Pilot/First Kostanza, a long-legged hairy-wristed halfback who sat behind her in the auxiliary pilot’s position, and whose displays had been set to an archived edition ofSporting Classics.
The acceleration couches swung lightly in their cages asCorona rotated around them. Martinez kept his eyes focused on his signals display board in front of him.
“Two-two-seven by one-two-zero relative, Lord Elcap,” Begay reported.
“Engines, prepare for acceleration,” said Tarafah.
“Engines signaled,” said Warrant Officer Second Class Mabumba, who was doing a class on propulsion to prepare for his exams for Warrant Officer/First.
The little muscle ticked in Tarafah’s cheek as he watched the digital readout on his displays. “Engines, accelerate on my mark,” he said, and then, as the counters ticked to 27:10:001, “Engines, fire engines.”
Gravity’s punch in the chest, and the gee suits tightening around arms and legs, told everyone in the ship that the engines had fired, but Mabumba reported the fact anyway, as protocol dictated. Acceleration couches swung to new attitudes as gee forces piled on, and began to generate the pulsing miniwaves that kept blood from pooling. The second division of Cruiser Squadron 18, echeloned so that each ship wouldn’t fry the one behind with its torch, blazed out toward the target.
Martinez saw that Tarafah seemed to relax once the engines were fired. There hadn’t been the slightest chance that theywouldn’t fire, of course: the dour, impatient Master Engineer Maheshwari had the engines well in hand, even considering the two footballers stuck in his department, one rated Engineer/First and supposedly in charge of his own watch.