Were promoted? How dearly bought was that last golden skull, Chu-sa? Did your family pay?-Or did you?”
“I see.” Kosho felt still and cold, the Mayan’s words a well-placed dart straight to the heart. She turned, sweeping the mess with a sharp, piercing glance. Every officer sat still as a statue-staring at the two of them in varying degrees of interest, horror, and uncertainty. “Rumor is fleet of foot, they say, and your ears will be filled with all manner of calamities.” Her voice echoed from the unfinished shoji. “I will say this-and no more-the Cornuelle was well and truly caught in a trap at Jagan. Her captain taken by surprise, myself trapped planet-side when the ship was stricken. The Admiralty made many excuses for us, but none of them are the truth. We had been out on patrol too long. We were far past tired, and our ship had worn down to nothing… a stupid, deadly mistake her captain rues to this day. His soul was in that ship, and now-with Cornuelle sent to the breaking yards-he is lost as well.”
Kosho inclined her head towards the ensigns sitting near the main door. “Remember this lesson. Chu-sa Hadeishi was one of the finest ship-handlers you could ever meet-and even he was caught out-defeated-by an enemy whose first weapon was patience. The odds always turn against you.”
“So is my belief, kyo,” Chac said, in a voice too low for the others to hear. “And what did you learn from this excellent teacher?”
Kosho’s right hand tightened on the breakfast tray. The Mayan matched her frigid stare without flinching, then raised one eyebrow minutely, bowed, and made his way out of the room. Susan did not watch him go, but stalked to her seat and sat down.
Kosho took two deep breaths, closed her eyes for a moment, and then set to eating the rice pudding. A fine breakfast with my officers, she thought, chewing mechanically. Very fine.
The next week passed in a blur of construction review, sitting in with Thai-i Goroemon while the Logistics officer bartered with Supply Service to fill the ship’s holds with perishables and spare parts, and the lengthy business of actually meeting all of her department heads and their staff. In all the confusion of the tribunal at Toroson and the hurry to get to her new command, Susan had neglected to obtain the services of a manservant or-as she might have claimed-a maid. She’d always considered Hadeishi’s maintenance of old Yejin some kind of a charitable arrangement… until now, when she woke one morning, twenty-one days after reporting aboard the Naniwa, and found she had not a single clean uniform left in her closet. The ship, of course, boasted a fine, modern laundry, but someone had to gather up the dirty clothes and send them off to be cleaned.
Her comm chimed politely, reminding her that Thai-sho Kasir-the operational commander of the Yards-was expecting her on v-cast within the hour. A whole set of Fleet orders packets had arrived during shipnight and they required discussion with the Zosen officers responsible for the Naniwa ’s construction, as well as other personnel issues she would have to manage herself.
Grandmother Suchiru would put her cane to the soles of my feet for this… Kosho stiffened at the thought of facing a superior Fleet officer in a less-than-immaculate uniform. All night and all day. What to do? Improvise. I will improvise.
Frowning, Susan commed the laundry and asked the petty officer on duty to send someone around to collect everything, then she found a reasonably clean kimono and clipped her hair back.
Laughing a little at herself, Kosho sat at her desk, woke up her main comp, and unfolded three v-panes on the desk surface. Chapultepec lower form never taught a better lesson than this!
Her stylus skipped across the control interface in a blur as she called up a skinning module, mapped her proper dress whites onto a splice of the v-cast feed routed back from the pickup nodes to pane two, then set pane three to show her what the admiral would see.
Six minutes before the v-cast started, she was finished tweaking herself and the door cycled open to admit one of the midshipmen.
“ Kyo?”
“Everything is over there, Jushin- tzin.” She watched him for a moment, toying with a pair of reassignment packets from the bigger pile, as he bustled around, gathering up uniform tunics. A thought occurred to her while she was waiting. “ Ko-hosei -do you know if our fitting officer is still aboard?”
“Chac- tzin?” Jushin’s expression was carefully neutral. “I believe so, Chu-sa.”
“Excellent.” Kosho considered the packets sitting on her desk, then shook her head. I will just have to make do with the resources at hand.
Two hours later, Susan had an excellent view of the construction frame enclosing the six-hundred-meter length of the Naniwa. Beyond the spindly web of metal and the hundreds of canisters queuing to be unloaded into the cargo bays, the striated orb of Jupiter blotted out most of the visible sky. The constellation of orbital habitats holding station between Europa and the gas giant were off to her left, though invisible save for the tiny moving flares of shuttles or cargo lighters trolling between the wide-spread components of the Akbal complex.
Kosho stepped carefully, wending her way along the hexacomb pattern of the shipskin tiles. Her combat armor boots were magnetized, as were the narrow walkways installed for the final fit-out of the ship. Primary hull construction had been completed early the previous year-the last sixteen months had been spent by the Zosen installing crew compartments, weapon systems, fuel bladders, and so on.
With the loading bays and internal atmosphere operational, the shipskin had been laid down-a quarter-million tiles according to one of the binders now filling up the tiny office in her quarters-and punched down to the shipnet. Each tile was composed of a multi-phase composite which could deform-within limits, of course-upon command. Reflective or refractive surfaces could deploy within milliseconds, absorptive ones as well. They were tough, too. A diamond-bit saw could barely scuff their surface, much less cut the material.
But the Chu-sa knew there were gangs of yard specialists running hundreds of tests against the skin, looking for defective linkages, bad command interfaces, or skunky tiles which had-for unknown reasons-lost their ability to deform with acceptable speed. Her boots trampling on the quiescent surface would trigger alarms and lead to unnecessary work.
We have enough to do, she thought pensively. Naniwa was still at least thirteen days from being spaceworthy.
The marine walking point in front of her raised a warning hand. They had entered a region of the shipskin where long radiating fins ran out from the hull, making a queer sort of forest-all black limbs and leaf-like extrusions frilled with thousands of tiny heat-exchanging surfaces.
“Priest dead ahead, kyo,” Socho Juarez muttered across the local comm. Susan could tell the sergeant major was unhappy, but who wanted their commander skylarking around outside the ship’s armor-even here, deep in Anahuac space-when they could be safely parked in Command, out of harm’s way? “ Chu-sa, do you want some privacy?”
Susan shook her head.
You’re sure? he signed. There are Mice everywhere.
Kosho almost laughed aloud. The Mice are always watching, she replied with a deft movement of her gloved fingers. “Feel free to listen in. But if you are worried-I will be polite.”
The officers complement on the Naniwa -including junior officers-stood at almost a hundred men and women. After her discussion with the Mayan hafuri, their attitude towards her had cooled noticeably. When she’d first come aboard, most of the five-hundred-plus crew were already hard at work, so Susan had found herself out of synch with her subordinates. There had been so much to do, however, they had started to gel into something like the team she expected.
But nothing like we had on the Cornuelle. Kosho knew that had been rare-Fleet crews usually had a high rate of turnover as specialists rotated out and the officers were promoted. A ship’s complement which remained substantially intact for three years-particularly under combat conditions-was almost unheard of save in the Clan- supplied squadrons. She missed the comfort long familiarity provided.
Proper respect for the Chu-sa was absolutely necessary for the proper functioning of the ship, but there was an uneasy tension Susan could not ignore, particularly when the fitting officer was not in her chain of command. The
