'A supply officer with calluses on his hands? That'll be the day.'
Everyone laughed, while Sykes made a production out of bringing out his data pad and making some notes. He glanced up and saw he had their attention. 'I'm just making some notes on what to serve the junior officers for dinner.'
'Not those fake shark steaks, I hope,' Paul noted.
'Sadly, no. There was a problem with the manufacturing facility, and we were advised to return all the steaks as they were unfit for human consumption.'
Mike Bristol, the assistant supply officer, nodded. 'Not that that's ever bothered us before, but this time they were officially unfit for human consumption.'
Colleen Kilgary eyed the odd-looking meal before her. 'One shudders to contemplate what it'd take to get something officially declared unfit to serve us, considering what we get most days.'
As he nodded in agreement, Paul remembered an uncompleted task, so he followed Kilgary out of the wardroom when the meal was over. 'Hey, Coll, I hadn't had a chance to tell you. I asked Jen about the new engineering stuff on the Maury. SARS?'
'SEERS. What's she think of it?'
'She said they can't tell, yet. Too much stuff in engineering still didn't work quite right after that yard period. Their Chief Engineer's not letting SEERS do much so far, because the Maury 's snipes are spending their time trying to manhandle it all back into shape.'
Kilgary grinned. 'Tweak. In the high-tech, ultra-modern Space Navy we tweak things in engineering. We may use a sledge hammer to do it, but we tweak.'
Paul laughed. 'Okay. I've seen the electricians tweak a few things by hitting them, so I guess it makes sense for snipes to work the same way. Jen said they'll probably let SEERS handle things this time out because they think they've got the engineering systems about where they should be.'
'Well, thanks for asking. I didn't expect she'd have too much to tell me at this point.'
'What's the thing do, anyway?'
'Run things.' Kilgary rolled her eyes. 'The systems on this ship are incredibly complex and because it's pretty much a closed environment anything one sub-system does affects all the other sub-systems. If you let a metal brain try to handle too much of it, it ends up mismanaging power loads because it gets caught in feedback loops.'
'You mean it reduces power somewhere, which means it has to do something else somewhere else.'
'Which makes it have to go back to the first place and maybe increase power again. Then it reduces more, then it increases more, and soon enough circuit breakers start popping. When a metal head starts over-reacting at the speed of light problems develop real fast. Human brains can spot the patterns developing somehow and even things out. But it's a real pain in the neck to deal with, especially in a critical power situation like combat. It'll be nice to have a metal head capable of handling that part of the job.'
Paul grinned. 'Maybe we won't need engineers, anymore.'
'Suits me. I can change over to one of those easy jobs in Operations Department.'
'Now you sound like Jen.'
'We just both happen to know what we're talking about. Speaking of female officers, how'd Val Isakov do on watch just now?'
'She seemed okay. Confident. Why?'
Kilgary shrugged. 'New officer. I'm just curious.'
'Well, she's got the whole ball of wax on the mid-watch. Along with me.'
'Lucky guy,' Kilgary murmured, then left before Paul could ask what she meant.
The bad part about being on watch on the bridge from midnight to four in the morning was that you weren't sleeping. The good part, the only good part in Paul's opinion, was that just about everybody else was sleeping. The watches tended to be quiet. No senior officers bulling in to raise hell, no scheduled events to add stress, just you and the other watch standers. The bridge, itself darkened not from necessity but to keep human body rhythms happy, sometimes felt to Paul like a cocoon of life traveling independently through the nothingness, the glowing display screens and instrument panels providing nearby artificial counterparts to the cold, distant light of innumerable stars shown on the visual displays.
Paul yawned, then grimaced and grabbed a quick gulp of coffee from the container clipped to his belt. Quiet and dark could be too nice. Too conducive to falling asleep, anyway, and the last thing anybody wanted to do was fall asleep on watch. Or, as Carl Meadows used to advise him, 'Falling asleep on watch is like falling off a cliff. It feels fine for a while, until you hit the bottom. Or in the case of sleeping on watch, until somebody finds you sleeping. Then you'll wish you had fallen off a cliff instead.'
'Paul.'
He looked over at Lieutenant Isakov. 'Yes, ma'am?'
She laughed. 'Ma'am?'
'You didn't tell me I could call you anything else.'
'Oh. Right. So, I'm Val. I've got a question for you.'
Paul couldn't be certain of her expression in the dim lighting. 'What's that?'
Isakov tapped her control console with two fingers for a moment before speaking again. 'I wonder… it looks like war, don't you think?'
'Maybe. I hope not.'
'I've never been in combat.'
'Neither have I.'
'But you did lead that damage control team. I've heard about it. Pretty nasty fire, right?'
Paul took a deep breath as the memory flooded back. 'Yeah. Forward Engineering was an inferno. We couldn't see a thing because of the smoke.' He felt his heart speeding up and tried to calm himself. That happened six months ago. But Chief Asher died in it and Scott Silver got court-martialed because of it. Because I helped chase down the evidence that Silver had been doing a lousy job and might've ordered Chief Asher to do something that started the fire. I wonder if anybody's told Isakov about all that? 'It was pretty intense.'
Isakov leaned toward Paul slightly, pitching her voice lower even though the enlisted watchstanders were deep in their own quiet conversation. 'Then you know. What it's like to face that kind of danger.'
'I… guess so.'
'It must have been very exciting.'
Paul shook his head. 'No. I was too scared to be excited.'
'Scared?' Isakov laughed again, in way which bothered Paul. 'Scared?'
'Yes. I had a lot of things to worry about.' He wondered if he sounded defensive, and wondered why he cared.
She leaned closer. 'So you don't believe in taking risks?'
'When I need to.'
A little closer. He thought he could feel her breath on his face. 'Some risks are worth choosing. Just for fun. Don't you think?'
Paul shook his head. 'No.'
Isakov grinned and leaned away again. 'That's not very heroic of you,' she noted with another laugh.
Not sure what Isakov was up to, he decided he should blow it off. 'I'm not a hero.'
She called up the Captain's Standing Orders on her display and made a show of reading them. Paul spent a few more moments wondering what it had all been about, then mentally shrugged and concentrated again on staying awake.
A week later, after standing a lot more watches with Isakov, he still hadn't figured her out. She knew her job, and sometimes talked about her time on the Isherwood, or the Ish-fish as the ship was nicknamed in the fleet, in a friendly fashion. Other times she treated Paul like they'd just met, and she hadn't been impressed by the experience.
But he had plenty of other things to worry about on this particular watch besides whatever ticked inside Isakov's head.
The Maury had left Franklin nearly a full day after the Michaelson, cutting a slightly tighter and faster course toward their rendezvous point. Thanks to the moon-bounce updates on Maury 's course and speed they'd been able to localize her much better than if they'd just been depending on passive detection of what signs of the other ship's
