The chief took his cup, placed it under the spigot and poured, half quivering with aesthetic joy as the rich aroma arose around him. Yum!
Davis took his accustomed place at his customary table to a chorus of, “Mornin’, Chief…” “Hiya Chief…” “Good eats, Chief…” Nose stuck in that good, good cup of under-the-table coffee, Davis acknowledged the salutations with an informal wave of his hand.
Without having to be told, one of the mess boys set a plate before Davis, the plate piled high with fried potatoes, a thick ham steak, and eggs over easy.
Before the chief could dig in Daisy materialized in the seat opposite his. She may have rarely appeared in the galley, unless something was about to go wrong, but she made a point of making the rounds of the messes.
“How’s breakfast, Chief Davis?’ she inquired.
“First rate, as always, Daisy Mae. How’s our ship?”
Daisy felt a little tingle, somewhere in her crystalline mind. Our ship. After subjective millennia of utter loneliness it meant more than she could say to belong, and not to be alone. This was true of both parts of her. That part which was the original CA-134 had spent a miserable couple of decades uncared for, unwanted and unloved as well.
“I’m fine,” Daisy answered. “Well, mostly I am. But I think a couple of the ball bearings in number two turret need replacing. I was testing it last night and heard a squeak that really ought not to be.”
“Get someone on it right after breakfast,” said the chief around half a mouthful of eggs.
“And the deck between the PBMRs could use some cleaning,” she added innocently.
Sintarleen checked the progress of the growing form in the tank. If I am reading this rightly, everything is perfect for this stage of development.
Still, I don’t like the temperature fluctuations. And the hormonal surges are sometimes out of control. How do these people, the female ones anyway, maintain their sanity under these circumstances?
As any human father could have told the Indowy, if asked, “the female ones, anyway,” typically did not. Nor did any males forced into close company with a thirteen-year-old girl.
A happy mess made for a happy ship, believed Davis. Thus, he didn’t immediately understand the problem, the sour faces and grim expressions that met him in the chief’s mess.
He shrugged and went to pour himself a cup of coffee. He could check into it later. He might even learn something about the problem at breakfast.
He poured himself a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar and took a healthy sip.
And immediately spat it out again. “Gah! That’s awful. What the fu — ”
He stopped as his eyes came to rest on the calendar posted over the pot. Four dates were circled on that calendar.
In red.
Davis went to the sink and poured out the coffee without regret. Then he got on the ship’s intercom and announced, “Swarinski, I was looking over the Nuke deck earlier this morning. It’s filthy. Take a crew and get on it. Now.”
The answer came back, “Chief Davis, I’m standing here, looking at it. The deck’s spotless.”
“Scrub it anyway, Swarinski.”
Interlude
Boredom was for a time of unending routine. Boredom was not for the time after word had returned telling of the outright massacre of the first fleet to reach the new world of the threshkreen.
Face buried in the Aldenat’ mush, Guanamarioch sensed something new in his messmates, similarly feeding around him. It was not anticipation, this new thing. It was something… something… something Guanamarioch remembered only dimly from his time in the pens as a nestling.
The Kessentai thought back, trying to recall memories he had long suppressed, memories of his small nestling hindquarters against the wall of the pen, fighting for his life against a horde of siblings who had decided he looked much like lunch. He remembered the flashing needlelike teeth, the yellow blood that flowed from a dozen tiny slashes on his face, neck and flanks. He remembered a lucky slash of his own that had disemboweled one of those who sought to eat him.
They had turned on that other one, then, turned on it and ripped it apart. That feeding had taken a long time, with the wounded one’s pitiful cries growing weaker as dozens clustered around, each taking a small bite.
Guanamarioch too had eaten, lunging in to sink his teeth into his brother’s hams before shaking his tiny head and tearing a bloody gob of warm, dripping meat from the body.
The God King had retreated to a corner then, bloody prize locked in the claws and jaws. There he had sat, trembling, alternately chewing and looking up to snarl and warn off any of the others who might seek to steal his prize.
He remembered being afraid then, afraid that someone would take his meal and afraid, even more, that in the frenzy he might too be ripped apart while still living.
Guanamarioch lifted his massive head from his mush bowl and looked around the mess room. No, there was no tremblings of fear among his clanskin. But then, neither was Guanamarioch shaking.
Then something happened, something in itself trivial. A God King of about the same rank as Guanamarioch nudged the mush bowl of one slightly superior. The latter then immediately turned and tore the throat from the clumsy one. All the others present immediately grabbed their bowls and backed up towards the nearest wall or other vertical surface, each one snarling as he did so.
Guanamarioch did the same, and realized, as he backed his haunches to the wall, that the news of these new thresh had them all terrified.
He understood though. Never before had a fleet of the People met serious resistance from any but their own. To have a fleet, even a small one, almost completely destroyed was terrifying indeed.
A door into the mess deck slid open with a slight whoosh. Through the door passed an oddly shaped robotic device. This glided across the deck silently. It then hovered lightly over the yellow-blood-soaked area of the mess where the clumsy Kessentai had had his throat torn open by another. The device fit the dimensions of the ship’s corridors and compartments well, leading Guanamarioch to think that this, too, was Aldenat’ technology.
Singly and by twos, the others cleared out from the mess and formed in the corridor adjacent the mess. In a few minutes, only Guanamarioch and the killer remained, the latter staring madly at the corpse, apparently in contemplation of eating it. This was not, in itself, forbidden, of course; the ethos of the People demanded that thresh not be wasted.
It was, however, forbidden to kill aboard ship during migration without permission.
A senior God King, not the lord of the clan but a close assistant entered the mess, followed by two cosslain, the superior normals that filled the job of noncommissioned officers within the Posleen host. The senior took in the entire compartment in a single sweeping glance before resting his yellow eyes on the corpse and the nearby killer.
“Did you see what happened, Junior?” the demi-lord demanded.
Guanamarioch bowed his head in respect. “I saw it, lord, but I did not understand it.”
The senior turned his attention back to the killer. “For what reason did you break the shiplaw and kill this one?” he asked calmly.
With apparent difficulty the murderer looked upward, away from the corpse, answering, “He nudged my feeding bowl.”
“It is my judgment that this is insufficient reason to break the law of the People. It is further my judgment that this conduct merits termination of existence. Have you anything to say?”