The Sirens of Space (17 page)

Quietly, he moved ahead to investigate.

“
Aw, crap!” muttered an angry voice.
The lieutenant ‘s head snapped toward the direction of the sound.
He saw a pair of legs sticking out from beneath a console station
in the middle of the room—Navigation, if he remembered correctly,
though ships could be awfully confusing. The legs were clad in
dirty fatigues and sporting a well-worn sneaker on each foot. The
left sneaker was held together with duct tape.

“
Excuse me,” the young officer said,
his voice firm and commanding. “But the bridge is still restricted
to— ”

“
Who’s that?” demanded the voice at
the other end of the feet. “Never mind—go get me the toolbox. It’s
over by the Auxnav.”

“
The what?”

“
The toolbox.”

“
No, I mean—the ‘onyx
valve?’”

“
No, no—the interface, the auxnav
interface.”

“
The ‘inner phase’ of—of
what?”

“
No, no, no. The auxiliary—who is
that, anyway?”

Seeing the captain scuttering out from
beneath the navigation console, the CSO lieutenant felt like a
hopeless imbecile. Here he was, charged with protecting the most
advanced machine in human history, and he hadn’t the slightest idea
what anyone was saying when they talked about the simplest bits of
equipment. Worse yet, he’d demonstrated his incompetence to his new
commander. Cook rose and dusted himself off, fixing the junior
officer in a glare of such severity that the young lieutenant felt
his face flushing like a ripe tomato, and his bladder preparing to
empty. But Cook’s mien soon softened into one of mild
curiosity.

“
You’re the new security officer,
aren’t you—Burdick, isn’t it? Yes, Burdick.”

Burdick’s throat was dry as dust, and he
found it impossible to swallow. “Yes, sir,” he managed at last, in
the scratchiest of voices.

“
Doesn’t CSO teach you people anything
about ships?” Cook sighed, more to himself than to the tortured
young man who imagined himself standing in judgment. “I swear—how
can they put you into space if you don’t know the first thing
about— ”

Cook looked to see his young security
officer near tears.

“
Well, never mind about that,” Cook
said, scratching his nose. “I guess you’ll learn soon
enough.”

“
Yes, sir,” nodded Burdick, his voice
barely audible. “I am a rather quick study.”

“
I imagine so. And by now I guess
you’ve probably adjusted to the different uniforms. CSO tan doesn’t
go with the decorum, you know. Too bland. Blends right into the
walls.”

“
Yes, sir,” Burdick laughed
weakly.

“
All right, then,” Cook smiled. He
pointed to a small box behind the second tier railing on the
starboard side of the bridge. “The toolbox is up there, by the
auxiliary navigation console.”

“
I’ll get it right away,
Captain.”

As his security officer scurried toward the
toolbox, Cook leaned back to sit on the main navigation console and
wiped the perspiration from his brow. Reprogramming the navigation
computer was a big job, and he wished he could trust his new
navigator to do it—Talbot, he thought; or was it Talley?
Whatever—he’d be arriving the day after tomorrow. Cook glanced over
his shoulder at the hopeless mess on the navigation screen. He
might not know everything in this Universe, but he did know that
there was just one Deneb. Not sixteen. If those idiot engineers
would use their heads in the first place—use Rigel and Deneb as
fixed points of reference instead of Demeter and New Babylon, whose
stars were too dim to be much use in the depths of space—he
wouldn’t have to go through this every time he got a new ship.

He breathed deeply as the young man returned
with the toolbox. Once he’d stopped, thought Cook, it was hard to
get started again. But he had to do this sooner or later. And since
he refused to argue the point with his navigator, it was better to
do it sooner. The file on this Tally-something pegged him as a
chronic complainer. The last thing Cook needed now was the added
grief of a temperamental navigator.

“
Here you are, Captain.”

“
Thank you, Mr. Burdick,” Cook said,
lifting himself off the main console. It was time to get started,
he thought; and he would keep at this until he was done. Or until
he was sick of it, whichever came first.

“
Carry on, then. And
Burdick?”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
Could you tell Chief Connors to come
to the bridge? We have some things to discuss, and he could give me
a hand here while we do it.”

“
Aye aye, sir. Right away!” Burdick
said, and hurried off the bridge.

Cook lowered himself onto the floor. They
should put padding under the consoles, he thought. That way, people
could work on computer innards without rubbing their backs raw. But
such concerns faded quickly, for he had other things on his mind.
Things like turning the navigation computers into something useful
rather than accepting Standard CosGuard Issue. Or finding a way to
tell Yeoman Chief Connors that there would be no hazing the tyros
on his ship.

“THIS IS RIDICULOUS.”

Cook exhaled loudly. He was leaning back in
his chair, feet propped up on his desk and holding a folded sheet
of paper. Untouched on a tray on a side table was a breakfast of
reconstituted eggs and toast, and a cup of lukewarm coffee. A
digital scanner was on the work table next to the wall, and display
disks were evenly divided between the floor and the half-open
binder box on the floor. He woke up in a foul mood. Insomnia kept
him up reading half the night, and that usually meant a rough day
for anyone he was around the next morning. The mail that greeted
him had not helped his disposition.

“
Problems?” asked Jeremy, entering the
room, wondering what new problems faced them today. The captain
seemed a font of boundless energy, but as nearly as Jeremy could
tell, most of that energy was focused on sending the ship’s
executive officer chasing in a dozen different
directions.

“
I haven’t been on Isis in fifteen
years,” Cook complained. “Aside from an occasional reference to my
Uncle Cornelius in letters from my parents, nobody tells me
anything that’s going on there. What do I know about local
politics? They don’t even tell me which district I vote in these
days, for crying out loud.”

Baffled, Jeremy walked to the captain’s desk
and took the paper from Cook’s hands. His eyes widened in surprise
when it dropped to the floor and unfolded into a sheet nearly eight
feet long. It was a ballot, sent him by the Northland Province
Elections Commission. By law, everyone in the Cosmic Guard received
an absentee ballot whenever his home planet held elections. Isis
had the minimum number of senators—one fixed-termer, one
special-termer elected whenever the president called for
elections—and this was the year Isis selected her fixed-term
senator. The Isitian ballot also presented a confusing array of
candidates and ballot proposals and was taller than he was. The
tiny printing on the ballot’s twelve columns did not seem designed
to help anyone to make sense of it all, and apparently nobody
thought to distribute the ballot by district. By the looks of it,
every office on the planet was listed. Fortunately there only
seemed to be two parties, and a brief scan of the top of the ticket
revealed a name that even Jeremy recognized.

“
There’s Irene McGinnis,” he said. “I
remember her from the hearings on that big scandal a few years ago.
She has quite a reputation, as I recall. I was quite impressed with
her.”

“
No, no, no,” Cook said, trying not to
sound impatient. “That’s not the way we do things on Isis. She’s
already had her turn. Besides, she’s the wrong party. She’s a
Nuthatcher.”

Jeremy looked again. The only parties on the
ballot were the Liberals and the Conservatives.

“
Well, you see,” Cook tried to
explain, “we don’t like to give anyone more than one turn in
Covington. Politicians are like naughty children. They’re easily
spoiled and must be constantly watched. Give them too much and it
goes right to their heads. Makes them think they’re big shots. So
tradition is quite specific. Nobody goes to the Senate more than
once. Anything beyond that is simply not very Isitian.”

“
But hasn’t she already served two
terms? And what in God’s name is a nuthatcher?”

“
On Isis, tradition is not carved in
stone,” Cook said testily. “And the Cooks vote for Mugwumps, not
Nuthatchers. Nuthatchers are a subspecies of unenlightened
visigoths. Corneilius Cook would never let me hear the end of
it.”

“
So what’s the problem?”

“
There is no problem.”

Cook voted straight Mugwump, too proud to
admit that McInnis—Old Ironpanties, as she was known on Isis—was
the only name apart from his uncle’s that he recognized as well.
All the while, he grumbled about the fact that he didn’t know
enough about the issues or candidates to vote for “None of the
Above.” Like most Isitians, he also voted to reject all the
proposals and initiatives, since voting for them only encouraged
similar nonsense in the future. It made no difference anyway, he
muttered to himself. In interplanetary politics everyone on Isis
was a Federalist: they stuffed the last Tory and put him in a
museum long ago. And it hardly mattered that the Mugwumps made a
hash of things whenever they came to power. The Nuthatchers were
just as bad, but at least this way they’d face a Mugwump mess in
the end. Those messes were usually more convoluted, of course, but
at least their hearts were in the right place. As he finished, he
noticed that Jeremy was trying not to laugh, and doing a very poor
job of it.

“
All right, what’s so funny?” Cook
snapped. Immediately, he felt a surge of guilt at his lack of good
temper. He knew that Jeremy wouldn’t like his next assignment, but
if there was one thing he’d learned on the
Constantine
, it was how to delegate assignments
that he didn’t want to do himself.

Of course, some jobs were easier to delegate
to people he didn’t like. Jeremy was such an improvement over his
last first officer that Cook hated pushing the advantages of rank
too far. That reluctance wouldn’t stop him from doing so, he
admitted to himself. But at least he had the decency to feel guilty
about it.

“It’s an outrage.”

“
That it is, Chief.”

“
It’s a bloody outrage.”

Chief Connors put down his wrench and shook
his head. Though progress had been steady, the emergency hatch was
proving more difficult than he’d anticipated. He took his
handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his brow and motioned to the
redshirt beside him to keep working. Taking his lead from the
Chief, Yeoman Sillers holstered his own wrench; it was time for
another break.

“
It’s disrespectful, that’s what it
is. Disrespectful of tradition and common sense.”

“
Aye on that, Chief.”

“
And ye know what really galls
me?”

Connors led Sillars away from the rest of
the repair crew. There was no need to sow any more dissension on
board. The captain had taken care of that with his sequestration
order: no visitors or departures until the ship was starworthy,
even if it meant working through the Cosmic New Year. The cream
colored walls muffled the sound in the corridors, but the screams
of the old time Cozzies still echoed through the ship. Connors
stopped as soon as they were a proper distance away.

“
What galls me,” the Chief whispered
conspiratorially, “is the way these tyro blueshirts go struttin
’round these hallways like they was desk jockeys out of Covington.
Barely three weeks here, and they still don’t know their butts from
a black hole—yet they have the temerity to tell me about pullin my
weight. As if I’ve been loafin at the throttle while they be takin
their own sweet time a-gettin here.

“
I tell ye, Sillars—if one more o’them
snotnosed groundtoads tries to tell me how to do me own job, I’ll
throttle’em myself.”

“
Calm down now, Chief. It ain’t as bad
as all that.”

“
Chief Connors?” A cry came from down
the hall. It was Crewman Recruit Larsen, the silk-shirt college boy
from Demeter. He’d signed up on a lark, because he was tired of
school and wanted to see the universe, but Connors liked him all
the same. He sang a good song, and for a college boy he talked with
an intelligible accent.

“
What is it this time,
Larsen?”

“
We’re ready to test the hatch,
again.”

“
Go ahead, Crewman; let’s see what
we’ve done to her this time.”

A buzzer rang in the hallway for an instant,
only to die like a strangled goose.

“
Chief— ”

“
I heard, Larsen. See what ye can do.
I’ll be along presently.” He turned a stern face toward
Sillars.

“
Ain’t as bad?” Connors muttered,
turning his fury to the matter at hand. “One of them tyros—a
bluebird name o’McKinsey, I think it was—come up to me while I was
mindin a whole field-f o’redshirt recruits on their way to help
unglitch the engine coils, and wanted me to folly her to the Molly
room. Seems she had a stackfull o’computer disks that needed cartin
off somewheres— ”