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....[A]t a dry dock back at the starbase an alarm tone exploded deep inside the cerebral cortex of CosGuard’s newest captain. Struggling toward consciousness, Cook groped to shut it off. His head was a symphony of pain, repaying him dearly for the hours of abandon he shared with the crew on his full last day commanding the Constantine. The clock by his bed read 350 Hours; he’d slept half the day—nearly five cosmic hours—and vaguely recalled that he still had a lot to do. He couldn’t remember what any of it might be, but he knew he had a full day in store. Still clothed in his standard blues, Cook staggered to the shower in his cabin and fumbled at the activator until the warm water began to flow. He leaned against the stall, grateful to have mastered his first major task of the day. Gradually, he shed his clothing, leaving it in an inert pile in the corner of the shower, and stood transfixed by the streams of water from the dual nozzles. After what seemed like several hours he opened the hatch, dragged himself back into the cabin, and fell onto his bed, face down and dripping wet, where he remained until his yeoman came to call him to duty.
“Commander—I mean, Captain Cook,” said the startled young woman. Tactfully, she tossed a bedsheet over his bare bottom before gently shaking his shoulder to wake him. As Cook began to stir she took to tidying the room a bit, throwing soiled fatigues and socks into the laundry shoot.
“You’re needed in security,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she could. “Some of the redshirts got rather out of hand last night, you see, and Lt. Moll would really like you to conduct the captain’s mast. You know...before you turn over the ship to Mr. LaRue.”
Cook grunted an acknowledgment of sorts, his groggy mind fighting its way toward consciousness. As his yeoman chattered merrily away, reminding him of the duties of a outgoing skipper, his two major tasks of the day gradually began to crystallize in his foggy brain.
First, he told himself, he would speak to Mr. LaRue about overdoing discipline upon assuming temporary command. This was a good crew, and good crews need nurturing, not an iron fist. The sooner LaRue understood this, the quicker his own command would follow. He started to sit up until he was interrupted by his giggling yeoman. Her face flushed beet red, as she quickly turned her eyes toward the far wall.
“Wrong again, Cook,” he smiled at her wearily, too tired to care about his loss of dignity. As carefully as he could, he leaned over to recover the fallen bedsheet.
“The second thing I’ll do is see Mr. LaRue.”
* * *
After a tasteless breakfast in the cafeteria, Cook made his way from B-Deck to Security, where he declared an amnesty for all infractions of the day before. The cheers still ringing in his aching head, he went down two more levels to Engineering, to say goodbye to Chief Engineer Seth Montgomery. The old-time Cozzie had been a favorite of Cook’s, with a Demetrian’s contempt for pomp and an endless supply of stories. The two had passed many an hour sharing a whiskey bottle and bemoaning the luck of the draw that had infected the ship with such a stickler of a first officer. They’d had a falling out the past few months as Cook’s personal life intruded upon their friendship, and Cook wanted to square things before he left. But Monty interrupted Cook’s apology with the observation that real friends had little need of such formalities, and such things were usually understood. “Especially,” Monty said, his eyes twinkling, “when the insulted friend is proven right.”
Cook laughed along with his friend, hoping that Monty wouldn’t be too disappointed when he learned that CosGuard’s newest starship skipper still had a few blind spots in affairs of the heart. He declined the offered drink; his head was still recovering from the last batch of “one more rounds” he’d had the previous night, and his stomach was already having trouble adjusting to the near-zero gravity that Monty kept in the engine room to make traversing easier. Instead, Cook spent his time listening to his friend tell about the starship skippers he should watch out for.
“The sorriest batch of losers in the heavens,” the engineer snorted, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Egos a parsec wide and mouths to match. Particularly that jackass from Demeter.”
“Jones?” smiled Cook. Jefferson McKinley Jones, the senior wing commander at DemCom, was reigning champion at the semi-annual maneuvers six times running. Cook’s sole encounter with the man—Jones literally patted him on the head after the Constantine had staunched a Red Fleet breach that would have cost Blue the encounter and Jones his sixth gold medal—had not endeared the esteemed Commodore Jones to the young Isitian.
“That self-important twit was a squirrelly frigateer when I knew him, befuddled as a fly in a glass ball. His idea of battle is two ships dead in space, firing amidships until someone’s shields buckle. The pompous bastard couldn’t tell his butt from a black hole then, and I hear he ain’t changed much since.”
Cook heard about men he already knew—Drexler from CentCom, Addison from Ceres, McIntyre from Looking Glass—and even shopworn stories about the old days, when Captain Porter Clay, with “Fighting Joe” Ferrigan and Little Dickie Blodgett, finally drove the pirates out of the Demeter sector. In the end, he quickly conceded that he’d fallen in with a hopeless cast of scoundrels , and led Monty on a last inspection of the ship’s powerful engines. The nine large cylinders, each three stories high, had seemed so huge when he first took command; it was hard to believe that they would be dwarfed by the fifteen monstrous engine blocks of a starship. All too soon, time came to bid his friend farewell.
“Next stop,” Cook called over his shoulder as he leaped toward second-story catwalk leading to the main corridor, “la maison de l’Escargot—and then, you’ll have a new skipper.”
“Still trying to talk some sense into François?” Monty shouted in return. In the low gravity Monty kept in the engine room, Cook sailed through the air like a diver, deftly coming to rest between the handholds on either side of the gangway atop the ’tweendecks companionway.
“Nice shot, Captain!”
“So long, Monty,” Cook laughed. “Maybe you’ll find someone who can beat your next skipper at no-grav bandyball.”
© 2009 by Jeffrey Caminsky
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