I heard of it. Lieutenant Riva had not seen fit to inform me of his new interest.”
Lieutenant Casell Riva obviously wasn’t “Casell” to Desjani anymore, not that Geary could blame her. Hell. And I’m the one who suggested to Desjani that she send Riva to a ship like Furious. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged again as if unconcerned. “It’s his loss, sir.”
“Damn straight.”
“It’s odd, though,” Desjani continued, her eyes looking past Geary. “At times I felt it was as if Lieutenant Riva had been in survival sleep the entire time he was imprisoned. He had stayed the same, his career and his life on hold, locked in the places where they had been when he was captured, just as he was physically locked inside the Syndic labor camp. Everything about him except his age was the same as I remembered.” She paused, thinking. “Once he got over the shock of being rescued, of finding me alive, I think it began to bother him that I had changed. I wasn’t the lieutenant he’d last seen, the lieutenant he’d remembered during his captivity.”
“If he spent that much time thinking about you in camp, I’m surprised he didn’t stay faithful once he got out.”
Desjani grinned without humor. “I didn’t say he was faithful to my memory, sir. There were a lot of women in that camp. Lieutenant Riva availed himself of temporary relationships. He admitted that to me, and I didn’t blame him, though I should have wondered why all of the relationships were temporary.”
“Was he jealous, do you think?” Geary asked. “Of you being a captain, and having your own ship?”
“I began to sense that, too. It frustrated Lieutenant Riva to see so many officers younger than him who outranked him. I told him promotion would likely come rapidly, but he seemed to feel it should be now, that he should somehow fast-forward until he caught up with the world that had moved on without him.” Desjani’s mouth twisted. “The officer he took up with on Furious was an ensign not much more than half his age.”
“That’s usually not a smart way for a man to boost his ego,” Geary observed. “Well, I’m still sorry.”
Desjani really did smile slightly this time. “I think I deserve better than him, sir.”
“There’s no doubt of that at all. Thank you, Tanya. Sorry I bothered you with this.”
“I appreciate your concern, sir.” Desjani’s smile turned rueful. “I should know better than to expect room in my life for a relationship. I already have a full-time commitment with a lady named Dauntless who demands all of my attention.”
“I know that feeling,” Geary agreed. “Being a commanding officer doesn’t leave much room for a life. You’re a good captain, though.”
“Thank you, sir.” Desjani stood and turned to go, then faced him again. “Sir, may I ask a personal question?”
“You’ve earned the right to that,” Geary observed. “We’ve been talking about your personal life. What is it?”
“How are you and Co-President Rione?”
Geary wasn’t sure which expression was appropriate and thought he ended up sort of smiling and lightly frowning simultaneously. “We’re doing all right, I think.”
“I…was surprised, sir. I didn’t expect her to go back to you.”
He nodded this time. “Me, too.”
Desjani hesitated. “Do you care for her, sir?”
“I think so.” Geary laughed shortly. “Hell, I don’t know. I think so.”
“And does she care for you?”
“I’m not sure.” If there was anyone who Geary could be open with about that, it was surely Desjani. “I don’t know. She doesn’t give a lot of clues to what she’s feeling.”
“She did once, sir,” Desjani stated quietly. “I can’t tell you what Co-President Rione is feeling right now, but I don’t think discovering that her husband might be alive would have struck her so hard if she had felt nothing for you. That’s just my opinion, of course.”
It wasn’t something that Geary had considered before. “Thanks for mentioning that. I can’t always… well…”
“Can’t always know if she’s telling the truth?” Desjani asked with a slight smile.
Geary smiled back at her. “Yeah. Rione’s a politician, but then I knew that going in.”
“Some politicians are worse than others, which means some must be better than others. And bad as politicians may be, there are worse professions.”
“Are there? Well, sure, like lawyers.”
“Yes, sir,” Desjani agreed. “Or literary agents. I might have become one.”
“You’re kidding.” Geary stared at her, trying to imagine the captain of Dauntless sitting at a desk somewhere on a planet, reading and selling tales of adventure instead of living them.
“My uncle offered me a job with his agency before I joined the fleet,” Desjani explained. “But aside from everything else, taking that job would have meant I had to work with writers, and you know what they’re like.”
“I’ve heard stories.” Geary couldn’t suppress a grin. “Is that one you just told me true?”
Desjani smiled back. “Perhaps, sir.”
She left, but Geary sat watching the closed hatch for a while. It was nice to be able to relax a bit with Desjani. She shared experiences with him, some of those born of separate careers in the fleet, which, though one hundred years apart, still had the common elements every officer and sailor had dealt with from the beginnings of the human race. Others sprang from their time on this ship together, dealing with the strains of command, of fighting alongside each other. It was, Geary realized, easy to talk to Desjani.
I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been in command of Desjani and still been on this ship, if we hadn’t been constrained by duty and honor…
Don’t even go there. Don’t even start to consider that. That’s not how it happened, and that’s not how it can ever happen.
HE woke up knowing it was not long after midnight of the ship’s day. Ideally, the fleet would arrive at Lakota at some reasonable hour when everyone had the benefit of a good night’s sleep and a leisurely breakfast. Assuming anyone could get a good night’s sleep the night before arriving in an enemy system holding an unknown number of enemy warships, or stomach breakfast when their nerves were knotted over the thought of impending combat. Still, the opportunity to do those things would have been nice.
But even though humanity had figured out how to break some rules of the universe under certain circumstances, like using the jump drives to travel faster than light between stars, the ways to break rules had their own rules. Traveling in jump space between Ixion and Lakota took a certain amount of time, no more and no less. The Alliance fleet would emerge into normal space again at the jump exit in Lakota at about zero four hundred in the morning on the day/night schedules the ships maintained to keep human biorhythms happy.
Four hours was a long time to lie awake next to Victoria Rione, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully. That alone was unusual enough that Geary didn’t want to disturb her. Whatever her thoughts and feelings actually were, at night they caused inner turmoil obvious to someone sharing his bed with her.
He got out of the bed carefully, dressed silently, then left, pausing in the entry to gaze back at Rione for a moment before starting to close the stateroom’s hatch, only to hear her call out, fully awake, “I’ll see you on the bridge.”
“Okay.” Damn. He couldn’t even tell when she was really asleep. Or know why she’d faked sleep until he was leaving, only to let him know at the last minute that he’d been fooled.
Captain Desjani was clearly awake, sitting in her command seat on the bridge and going over her ship’s preparations for battle. She flashed him a look filled with confidence. “You’re a little early, sir.”
“It’s kind of hard to sleep.” He spent a few moments going over the same fleet status readouts that he’d been studying for days, then stood up again. “I’m going to walk around the ship.”
As he had guessed, just about everyone else in the crew seemed to be awake already as well. Even those who had come off the watches that ended at midnight had stayed up to mingle restlessly with others in mess areas or at duty stations. Geary fixed a hopefully calm and confident look on his face and walked among them, exchanging greetings and making small talk about homes and how they’d surely beat the Syndics again in Lakota System. Whenever conversations veered to when the fleet would get home, Geary tried to be honest. He didn’t know when the fleet would once again reach Alliance space, but he was doing all he could to make it happen.
