Susan absorbed it all in stride. “And when your tour is up? Will you go to another ship?”
“It’s a two-year commitment. That’s the minimum time it takes to justify the costs of training us for the job, which is six intensive months by itself.”
She managed not to scoff at the idea of a CL’s “intensive” training regimen. Lessons included: how to use up all the ship’s hot water in too-long showers, how to passive-aggressively undermine the legitimate CO, how to get enlisted ranks to hate you in thirty seconds or less. Honestly, even after a career of more than two decades, she’d never given much thought to CLs until she had one. They were always just … there. The good ones were mostly unobtrusive and invisible to the rest of the crew, while the bad ones were celebrated only for leaving.
“And you jump around from command to command during that term, I assume?”
“We do. Long-term assignments are discouraged. It’s best if we’re not around any one crew long enough to develop the sort of relationships that can impact our objectivity. Honestly, this is my third assignment, and other than passing each other in a corridor, it’s the first time I’ve been alone with any of the three COs I’ve advised.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I think the rest of this tour will prove pretty boring. With their oiler destroyed, Chusexx is down to whatever AM they’ve got in their tanks. Couple that with all the damage they took and their spares lockers have to be looking a bit thin as well. Thuk seems like a reasonable sort. Whatever his orders were before the accident, I doubt he’s real excited about the prospect of another prolonged cat-and-mouse game without returning to base for resupply and refit. I sure as hell wouldn’t be.”
“Let’s hope you’re right. We’ve had enough nasty surprises on this tour already. If I ever see a Xre warship again, it’ll be too soon.”
Susan smiled. “We finally agree on something.”
NINETEEN
The suddenness of the VR alarm that roused Tyson from his dream state startled him so badly he nearly fell out of bed. Only an outstretched arm finding the tile mosaic of his bedroom floor prevented him from spilling onto it in a tangle of blankets and limbs.
“Jesus, what the fuck was that?”
“It was an alarm, genius,” Paris said inside his head, still sounding salty.
“Yes, I understand that, but why did it go off?”
“Because it’s nine in the morning and you slept through the more polite ones.”
“Nine a.m.?” Tyson jumped to his feet and looked to the analog clock mounted on the far wall of his sleeping quarter, scarcely willing to believe what she was saying. He’d woken up at five o’clock in the morning like a metronome for the last thirty years. It took him a couple tries to resolve the image of the antique clock, and another couple to remember what the damned hashmarks meant, likely owing at least in part to the empty bottle of single-malt scotch that had rolled into the corner of his bedchambers. But sure enough, the clock on the wall confirmed Paris’s absurd claim.
“I’ve already rescheduled or canceled your morning meetings. You have ‘food poisoning.’ You have three new interview requests, an emergency budget meeting, and the quarterly shareholder address this evening. I assume you won’t make me cancel that?”
“No! No, just, let me get myself together.”
“Would you like breakfast delivered to your office?”
“Yes, absolutely. I’ll be in the shower.”
“Whatever.” The connection went dead, leaving Tyson to ponder the sequence of events and decisions that had brought him to the moment where he was copping attitude from his artificially intelligent, virtual assistant for refusing to have sex with her five minutes after getting her new body.
Rockefeller never dealt with this shit.
Tyson grabbed a prebrewed pot of black tea off the wall mount in his kitchen and poured a generous cup, then sucked down the nearly scalding bitter liquid in three big gulps. He was not hungover per se, as the immune-boosting nanites in his bloodstream were also ruthlessly efficient at scrubbing the body of the methyl alcohol and other volatile compounds that caused that unenviable set of symptoms. But, despite centuries of medical advancement, no one had yet cracked the cure for sleep deficiency.
Not that it hadn’t been tried. A few decades ago, in an attempt to boost fleet efficiency, someone had tried a gene-hack that would let naval personnel “sleep” the way dolphins did, shutting down one hemisphere of their brains at a time, allowing them to remain conscious for many days at a stretch. The end results worked, but they spent sixteen hours a day only half awake with reduced IQs and complex problem-solving. Apparently, operating warships was more mentally taxing than chasing fish, and crew efficiency plummeted in the test vessel. Funding for the experiment was thankfully pulled not long after.
Tyson set down the cup and staggered over to the shower like the living dead. There was nothing to strip out of, as he slept naked. He set the shower to forty-five degrees and picked an appropriately high-energy classical music selection to help boost his own morale. “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin always managed to jolt him awake, and it was brief enough to get him in and out of the shower in an appropriately short amount of time.
The water hit him from a dozen different angles as the shower’s lighting system pulsed in time to the music, rising with the vocals, or what passed for them. It was a simply scandalous amount of water just for a personal shower, but the graywater reclamation system ran at nearly ninety-nine percent efficiency, so Tyson felt no shame as the burning liquid cascaded down his body, loosening knotted muscles and
