hell of a lot of nickels, anyway. Who expects to run into a two-striper old enough to be his father?'
'That's not what I had in mind. Besides, I already knew you were a mustang,' Menefee said. 'But you're not…' He paused, visibly weighing his options. Then he plunged, like a man throwing a double-sawbuck raise into a poker game. 'You're not a hardass, the way I figured you might be.'
He had nerve. He had smarts, too. If that had rubbed Sam the wrong way, it could have blighted things between skipper and exec from then on out. But Menefee had it right-Sam wasn't a hardass, except every once in a while when he needed to be. 'I hope not-life's mostly too short,' he said now. 'How come you had me gauged that way?'
'Well, I knew the executive officer you had before didn't last very long,' Lon Menefee said. 'If you're in my shoes, that makes you wonder.'
'Mm, I can see that it would,' Sam allowed. 'Why don't you come to my cabin? Then we can talk about things without every sailor on the ship swinging his big, flapping hydrophones towards us.'
'Hydrophones, huh?' Menefee's eyes crinkled at the corners. His mouth didn't move much, but Sam liked the smile anyway. 'Lead on, sir. You know where we're going.'
'I'll give you the grand tour in a bit,' Sam said. 'Come on.'
After he closed the door to the captain's little cabin, he pulled a bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses from the steel desk by his bed. 'Medicinal, of course,' Lieutenant Menefee observed.
'Well, sure,' Sam said, pouring. 'Good for what ails you, whatever the devil it is.' He handed the new exec one of the glasses. 'Mud in your eye.' They both drank. The brandy wasn't the best Sam had ever had-nowhere close. But it was strong, which mattered more. 'So you want to hear about the old exec, do you?'
'If I'm going to sail these waters, sir, shouldn't I know where the mines are?'
'That seems fair enough,' Sam said, and told him the story of Myron Zwilling. He finished, 'This is just my side of it, you understand. If you listen to him, I'm sure you'd hear something different.' One corner of his mouth quirked upward. 'Yeah, just a little.'
'I'll bet you one thing, sir,' Menefee said: 'He wouldn't figure the story had two sides. He'd tell me his was the only one, and he'd get mad if I tried to tell him anything different.'
'I wouldn't be surprised,' Sam said. Zwilling hadn't had any doubts. Sure as hell, that was part of his problem. 'Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?'
'I hope there's gray,' Menefee said. 'Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think.'
That sounded like the right answer. But did he mean it, or was he saying what he thought his new skipper wanted to hear? I'll find out, Sam thought. Aloud, he said, 'Things aboard ship are pretty much cut-and-dried right now. They'll stay that way, too, I hope, unless we need to pick another prize crew.'
'I'll be all right with that,' Menefee said. 'I just got here, so I don't know who doesn't like me and who really can't stand me. Those are about the only choices an exec has, aren't they?'
'Pretty much,' Sam said. 'Is this your first time in the duty?'
'Yes, sir,' the younger man replied. By the way he said it, a second term as executive officer wouldn't be far removed from a second conviction for theft. Maybe he wasn't so wrong, either. Didn't a second term as exec say you didn't deserve a command of your own?
'Just play it straight, and I expect you'll do fine,' Carsten said, hoping he was right. 'Pretty soon you'll have a ship of your own, and then somebody else will do your dirty work for you.'
Menefee grinned. 'I've heard ideas I like less-I'll tell you that. But I don't know. The war's liable to be over before they get around to giving me my own command, and after that the Navy'll shrink like nobody's business. Or do you think I'm wrong, sir?'
'It worked that way the last time around-I remember,' Sam said. 'This time? Well, who knows? After we get done beating the Confederates on land, we'll still need ships to teach Argentina a lesson, and England, and Japan. One of these days, the Japs'll have to learn they can't screw around with the Sandwich Islands.'
'Can we go on with the little fights once the big one's over? Will anybody care, or will people be so hot for peace that they don't give a damn about anything else?'
'We'll find out, that's all,' Sam said. The questions impressed him. Plainly, Lon Menefee had an eye for what was important. That was a good asset for an executive officer-or anybody else. 'All we can do is what they tell us to do,' Sam went on, and reached for the brandy bottle. 'Want another knock?'
'No, thanks,' Menefee said. 'One's plenty for me. But don't let me stop you.'
'I'm not gonna do it by myself.' Sam put the bottle back into the desk drawer. He eyed Menefee, and wasn't astonished to find the new officer eyeing him, too. They'd both passed a test of sorts. The exec would have a friendly drink, but didn't care to take it much further than that. And Menefee had seen that, while Sam didn't live by the Navy's officially dry rules, he wasn't a closet lush, either. And neither of them had said a word about it, and neither would.
As the desk drawer closed, Menefee said, 'Will you give me the tour, then, and let me meet some of the sailors who won't be able to stand me?' He spoke without rancor, and in the tones of a man who knew how things worked-and that they would work that way no matter what he thought about it. The slightly crooked grin that accompanied the words said the same thing. Sam approved, having a similar view of the world himself.
He took Menefee to the bridge first. Thad Walters had the conn, which meant a petty officer was minding the Y-ranging screens. The Josephus Daniels just didn't carry a large complement of officers. When Sam told the new exec that the chief hydrophone operator was a CPO, Menefee raised one eyebrow but then nodded, taking the news in stride.
'Lots of antiaircraft guns. I saw that when I came aboard,' Menefee remarked when they went out on deck.
'That's right, and I wish we carried even more,' Sam said. 'The only ship-to-ship action we've fought was with a freighter that carried a light cruiser's guns. We whipped the bastard, too.' Sam remembered the pride-and the terror-of that North Atlantic fight. 'Most of the time, though, airplanes are our number-one worry. Way things are nowadays, warships can't get close enough to shoot at other warships. So, yeah-twin 40mm mounts all over the damn place, and the four-inchers are dual purpose, too.'
'Sure. They've got more reach than the smaller guns.' Lieutenant Menefee nodded. 'Things look about the same to me. If we don't find some kind of way to keep bombers off our backs, the whole surface Navy's liable to be in trouble.'
'During the Great War, everybody flabbled about submersibles. This time around, it's airplanes. But as long as we bring our own airplanes with us, we can fight anywhere. And the carriers need ships to help keep the bad guys' airplanes away from them, so I figure we can keep working awhile longer, anyhow.'
'Sounds good to me, sir.' Menefee gave him another of those wry grins.
When they got to the engine room, the new exec started gabbing with the black gang in a way that showed he knew exactly what he was talking about. 'So you come from engineering?' Sam said.
'Shows a little, does it?' Menefee said. 'Yes, that's what I know. How about you, sir?'
'Gunnery and damage control,' Sam answered. 'We've got the ship covered between us-except for all the fancy new electronics, I mean.'
'Most of the guys who understand that stuff don't understand anything else-looks that way to me, anyhow,' Menefee said.
'Me, too,' Carsten agreed. 'If you can figure out all the fancy circuits, doesn't seem likely you'll know how people work. I wouldn't want one of those slide-rule pushers in charge of a ship.' But then he stopped himself, holding up his right hand. 'Thad's an exception, I think. He can make the Y-ranging gear sit up and roll over and beg, but he's a damn good officer, too. You'll see.'
'He's mighty young. He's had the chance to get used to it right from the start,' Menefee said. Sam nodded, carefully holding in his smile. To his eyes, Lon Menefee was mighty damn young, too. But the new exec was right- there were degrees to everything. Young, younger, youngest. Sam couldn't hide the smile any more. Where the hell did old fart fit into that scheme?
N ot Richmond, not any more. Richmond was a battleground. Basically, everything north of the James was a battleground-except for what had already fallen. And the damnyankees had a couple of bridgeheads over the river, too. They hadn't tried to break out of them, not yet, but the Confederates couldn't smash them, either. And so, when Clarence Potter left Lexington to report to Jake Featherston on what the physicists at Washington University
