Changer of Worlds

also the wrong thing to do.

“Well, Ms. Harrington? If you’re bored, just say so. I’m sure Chief MacArthur has better things to do with her time as well. Are you bored?”

“No, Sir.” She gave the only possible answer as neutrally as possible, and Santino smiled nastily.

“Indeed? I would’ve thought otherwise, given the way you’re humming and playing with your little pet.”

Once again, there was no possible response that would not give him another opening. She felt Bradlaugh’s unhappiness beside her, but Audrey said nothing, either. There wasn’t anything she could say, and she’d experienced sufficient of Santino’s nastiness herself. But MacArthur shifted her weight, and turned to face the lieutenant. Her non-expression was more pronounced than ever, and she cleared her throat.

“With all due respect, Sir,” she said, “the young ladies have been very attentive this afternoon.”

Santino turned his scowl on her.

“I don’t recall asking your opinion of their attentiveness, Chief MacArthur.” His voice was harsh, but MacArthur never turned a hair.

“I realize that, Sir. But again with all due respect, you just came around the corner. I’ve been working with Ms. Harrington and Ms. Bradlaugh for the last hour and a half. I just felt that I should make you aware of the fact that they’ve paid very close attention during that time.”

“I see.” For a moment, Honor thought the lieutenant was going to chew MacArthur out as well for having the audacity to interfere. But it seemed even Elvis Santino wasn’t quite stupid enough to risk making this sort of dispute with a noncom of MacArthur’s seniority and in his own shipboard department part of the official record. He rocked up and down on the balls of his feet for several seconds then returned his glare to Honor.

“No matter how much attention you’ve been paying, there’s no excuse for slacking off,” he told her. “I realize Regs permit you to carry that creature with you on duty, but I warn you not to abuse that privilege. And stop playing with it when you ought to be concentrating on what you’re here to learn! I trust I’ve made myself sufficiently clear?”

“Yes, Sir,” Honor said woodenly. “Perfectly clear.”

“Good!” Santino snapped, and strode briskly away.

“Lord! What is his problem?” Nassios Makira groaned.

The stocky midshipman heaved himself up to sit on the edge of his upper-tier bunk, legs dangling over the side. Honor couldn’t imagine why he liked perching up there so much. He was shorter than she was, true, but the deckhead was too low to let even Nassios sit fully upright on his bunk. Maybe it was because she was taller than he was? As a matter of fact, Nassios was one of the shortest people aboard War Maiden. So did he spend so much time climbing around like a ’cat or an Old Earth monkey because it was the only way he could get above eye level on everyone else?

“I don’t know,” Audrey Bradlaugh replied without looking up from the boot in her lap. No names had been mentioned, but she seemed in no doubt about the object of Nassios’ plaint. “But I do know that complaining about him is only going to make it worse if it gets back to him,” the red-haired midshipwoman added pointedly, reaching for the polish on the berthing compartment table.

“Hey, let the man talk,” Basanta Lakhia put in. The dark-skinned young midshipman with the startlingly blond hair lay comfortably stretched out on his own bunk. “No one’s gonna be tattling to Santino on him, and even if anyone did, it’s not against Regs to discuss a senior officer.”

“Not as long as the discussion isn’t prejudicial to discipline,” Honor corrected.

Somewhat to her surprise, she’d found herself the senior of War Maiden’s midshipmen on the basis of their comparative class standings. That, unfortunately, only seemed to make matters worse where Santino was concerned, since her seniority—such as it was—pushed him into somewhat closer proximity with her than with the other middies. It also gave her a greater degree of responsibility to provide a voice of reason in snotty bull sessions, and now she looked up to give Makira a rather pointed glance from where she sat beside Bradlaugh at the table, running a brush over Nimitz’s pelt. It was unusual for all four of them to be off-duty at once, but middies tended to be assigned to rotating watch schedules, and this time their off-watch periods happened to overlap. In fact, they had almost two more hours before Audrey and Basanta had to report for duty.

“Honor, you know I’d never, ever want to prejudice discipline,” Nassios said piously. “Or that anything I did could possibly prejudice it as much as he does,” he added sotto voce.

“Basanta’s right that no one is going to be carrying tales, Nassios,” Audrey said, looking up at last. “But that’s exactly the kind of crack that’s going to bring him—and the Exec—down on you like a shuttle with dead counter-grav if it gets back to them.”

“I know. I know,” Nassios sighed. “But you’ve got to admit he’s going awful far out of his way to make himself a royal pain, Audrey! And the way he keeps picking on Honor over Nimitz… ”

“Maybe he thinks it’s part of his job as our training officer,” Honor suggested. She finished brushing Nimitz and carefully gathered up the loose fluff for disposal someplace other than in the compartment’s air filters.

“Huh! Sure he does!” Basanta snorted.

“I didn’t say I agreed with him if he did,” Honor said serenely. “But you know as well as I do that there’s still the old ‘stomp on them hard enough to make them tough’ school of snotty-training.”

“Yeah, but it’s dying out,” Nassios argued. “Most of the people you run into who still think that way are old farts from the old school. You know, the ones who think starships should run on steam plants or reaction thrusters… or maybe oars! Santino’s too young for that kind of crap. Besides, it still doesn’t explain the wild hair he’s got up his ass over Nimitz!”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” Basanta said thoughtfully. “You may have a point, Honor—about the reason he’s such a hard ass in the first place, anyway. He’s not all that much older than we are, but if his OCTO worked that way, he could just be following in the same tradition.”

“And the reason he keeps picking on Nimitz?” Nassios challenged.

“Maybe he’s just one of those people who can’t get past the image of treecats as dumb animals,” Bradlaugh suggested. “Lord knows I wasn’t ready for how smart the little devil is. And I wouldn’t have believed Honor if she’d just told me about it either.”

“That could be it,” Honor agreed. “Most people can figure out the difference between a treecat and a pet once they come face-to-face with the real thing, but that’s hardly universally true. I think it depends on how much imagination they have.”

“And imagination isn’t something he’s exactly brimming over with,” Basanta pointed out. “Which goes back to what Honor said in the first place. If he doesn’t have much imagination—” his tone suggested that he’d had a rather more pointed noun in mind “—of his own, he probably is treating us the same way his OCTO treated him. Once he got pointed that way, he couldn’t figure out another way to go.”

“I don’t think he needed anyone to point him in that direction,” Nassios muttered, and although she was the one who’d put the suggestion forward, Honor agreed with him. For that matter, she felt morally certain that Santino’s behavior was a natural product of his disposition which owed nothing to anyone else’s example. Not that she doubted for a moment that his defense, if anyone senior to him called him on it, would be that he was only doing it “for their own good.”

“If he ever needed a pointer, he doesn’t need one anymore, that’s for sure,” Basanta agreed, then shook himself. “Say, has anybody seen any of the sims Commander Hirake is setting up for us?”

“No, but PO Wallace warned me they were going to be toughies,” Audrey chimed in, supporting the change of subject, and Honor sat back down and gathered Nimitz into her arms while the comfortable shop talk flowed around her.

She ought, she reflected, to be happier than she’d ever been in her life, and in many ways she was. But Elvis Santino was doing his best to keep her happiness from being complete, and he was succeeding. Despite anything she might say to the others, she was morally certain the abusive, sarcastic, belittling behavior he directed at all of them, and especially at her and Nimitz, sprang from a pronounced bullying streak. Worse, she suspected that streak was aggravated by natural stupidity.

And he was stupid. She only had to watch him performing as War