Had Helen decided to pursue him aggressively, it would have been like trying to embrace an Old Earth porcupine. And, in the end, almost certainly as futile as it would have been painful. So it was possibly a good thing she wasn't certain she wanted to "pursue" him at all. Yet she suspected that he, like her, felt the changes in whatever was growing between them. It was already too intense for Helen to call it mere friendship, but hadn't-quite-toppled over into anything else yet.
Yet.
She grimaced, looking out through the armorplast, and felt a reverberation of loss as she saw a pinnace separate from Vigilant and head for Hexapuma . It reminded her of so much, and along with the loss, she felt a stab of guilt. Ragnhild had been gone for barely three weeks, and it seemed grotesque that the death of one of Helen's two closest friends could have had such a powerful effect on drawing her and Paulo closer. It felt almost like a betrayal of her friend's memory. And yet there was a sense of rightness to it, as well. As if it were an affirmation that life went on.
She sighed, then shook her head as her chrono chimed softly.
It was time to report for duty herself, and she shoved herself up out of the comfortable chair as Vigilant's pinnace began its final approach to Hexapuma .
No doubt Commander Hope was coming aboard to find out what all of this was about, Helen thought, and smiled again, crookedly, wishing she could be a fly on the Skipper's cabin bulkhead.
"Well, I thought that went fairly well," Terekhov said as the cabin hatch closed behind Eleanor Hope and Lieutenant Commander Osborne Diamond, her executive officer.
"You did, did you... Sir?" Ginger Lewis responded, and he turned to look at her. She sat in one of his comfortable armchairs, just to one side of Sinead's portrait. Terekhov was certain the juxtapositioning was a coincidence, but he was struck again by how much Commander Lewis looked like a younger, slightly taller version of his wife.
Which isn't precisely what you need to be thinking about your acting XO, Aivars, he told himself wryly.
"Yes, I did," he replied. He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from the carafe Joanna Agnelli had provided, leaned back, and crossed his legs. "Why? Didn't you?" he asked innocently.
"Skipper, far be it from me to suggest you're talking through your beret, but Hope doesn't care much for this little brainstorm of yours. And she still doesn't know the half of it, whatever she may suspect."
"Nonsense. Just a little perfectly understandable... -apprehension at having her previous orders overruled on such short notice, I'm sure."
"Sure it was," Ginger said, shaking her head with a smile. Then her expression sobered. "Skipper, I don't much care for Hope. She looks to me like an ass-coverer who abhors the very thought of sticking her neck out. When she figures out what you're really planning, she's going to have three kinds of hissy fit."
"What I'm really planning?" Terekhov arched his eyebrows, and she snorted.
"I'm an engineer, not a tactical officer, Sir. I check the gizmos and widgets, oil the parts, wind the ship up, and make her go wherever you lordly tactical types decide. And I do my best to patch up the holes you same tactical types eventually get blown in my perfectly good ship. Still, I'm not exactly brain dead, and I've had six months now to watch you in action. Do you really think I haven't figured it out?"
Terekhov considered her thoughtfully. He'd found himself missing Ansten FitzGerald more and more badly since sending him off to Monica seventeen days ago. Indeed, he'd been more than a little surprised by just how badly. The executive officer wasn't brilliant, but he was far, far from stupid, and he was also competent and experienced and possessed the courage of his convictions. He'd become exactly the sort of sounding board a good XO was supposed to be, even when Terekhov never said a word to him. Simply visualizing FitzGerald's probable response was often all he needed to do.
Ginger Lewis was different. Although, as she'd just pointed out, she was an engineering specialist, not a tac officer, she had a first-class brain-a better one than FitzGerald's, as a matter of fact. Possibly even a better one than Terekhov himself had, he often thought. And the fact that she'd come up as a mustang, without ever attending Saganami Island, gave her a different perspective. It was as if thinking outside the box came naturally for her, and she possessed a degree of irreverence which was both rare in a regular officer and refreshing. In many ways, he realized, she was almost more valuable to him in the present circumstances than FitzGerald himself might have been.
"I imagine you've deduced most of it, Ginger," he conceded after a moment. "And you're probably right that Hope isn't going to be delighted when she finds out. Assuming, of course, that worse comes to worst and we do end up provoking a major interstellar incident."
"You remember, back in 281, when Duchess Harrington blew that Peep Q-ship out of space in Basilisk, Skipper? You know, the one that got her convicted as a mass murderer in absentia by the Peeps?" Ginger asked, and he nodded.
"Well, that was 'a major interstellar incident,'" she said. "What you've got in mind is going to be something else entirely. Something I'm not sure they've actually invented a word for yet. Although, now that I think about it, 'act of war' might come pretty close."
He considered disagreeing with her, but he didn't.
She was right, after all.
"I knew Yvernau was an idiot," Dame Estelle Matsuko said over the appetizer. "I never realized he was directly descended from a lemming, though."
"'Lemming,' Milady?" Gregor O'Shaughnessy repeated, and she wrinkled her nose and reached for her wineglass. She sipped, then set the glass back down and brushed her lips with a napkin.
"It's a species they have on Medusa," she told him. "Actually, the name goes back to an Old Earth species. The Medusan version was named because it has some similar habits. Specifically, at irregular intervals, enormous masses of them get together and either charge off the edge of a high cliff or swim straight out to sea until they drown."
"Why in the world do they do that?"
"Usually because they breed like Old Earth rabbits, only more so. Their numbers grow to a level which threatens to destroy their environment, and that seems to be their genetically programmed mechanism for reducing the population pressure."
"It seems a bit excessive," the analyst observed.
"Mother Nature can afford to be excessive," Medusa pointed out. "There are always plenty more where they came from, after all."
"True," O'Shaughnessy conceded, then cocked his head. "Actually, that's not a bad metaphor for Yvernau, now that I think about it. He and his fellow oligarchs really are threatening their own environment, and like those... lemmings of yours, there are, unfortunately, plenty more where he came from. Although, to be fair, I was also rather taken with Alquezar's metaphor during the debate."
"'Dinosaurs with stomachs full of frozen buttercups,'" Medusa quoted with a certain relish. "Something wrong with it, though. I don't think it was dinosaurs with buttercup-stuffed tummies. I think it was... elephants? Hippopotami? Something warm-blooded, anyway. But it was a nice turn of phrase, I'll grant you that."
"And Yvernau didn't like it very much, either," O'Shaughnessy said with poorly suppressed glee.
"No. No, he didn't," the baroness agreed judiciously.
She and her guest fell silent as uniformed Navy stewards, assigned to her support staff along with Colonel Gray's Marines, removed the appetizers and replaced them with the soup course. It was a delicious local concoction of chicken, rice and a local grain which closely resembled pearl barley, and the Provisional Governor sampled it appreciatively.
"So how do you think the New Tuscan government's going to react to his little fiasco, Milady?" O'Shaughnessy asked. He was officially her analyst and intelligence chief, but he'd long since discovered that in political matters, she was often better at his job than he was.
"Hard to say," she replied thoughtfully. "What they ought to do is get behind him and help him over the cliff, of course. I just wish I were confident they'll see it that way."