The Tempest’s operations officer, Admiral Trejo’s third in command, was waiting for him on the other side of the airlock. Technically they were the same naval rank, but as a ship’s captain, tradition dictated that Singh be treated as the superior officer. She saluted and granted him permission to board.
“The admiral would have greeted you personally,” she said as she led him out of the airlock and they floated down a short corridor to a lift. The walls in the Tempest looked like sheets of frosted glass, and glowed with a gentle blue light. Very different from the bulkheads of the Gathering Storm. “But this close to the gate he doesn’t like to leave the bridge.”
“Fisher, right? I think you were a year behind me at the academy.”
“I was,” she replied with a nod. “Engineering track. Everyone said logistics was the faster path to command, but I just love working with exotic tech.”
She stopped and tapped on the wall panel to call a lift. While they waited, the bulkheads began to pulse from blue to yellow.
“Grab a handhold,” Fisher said, pointing to one close by. “Drive is about to come online.”
A moment later they both drifted to the deck, and Singh felt his weight grow until it was about half a g.
“Not in a hurry,” Singh said, and the elevator made a gentle beep and the doors opened.
“The admiral’s a cautious man.”
“Speaks well of him,” he said as they began to rise.
Admiral Trejo was a short, stocky man, with bright-green eyes and thinning black hair. He came from the Mariner Valley region of Mars, but the traces of his accent were almost imperceptible. He was also the most decorated officer in Laconia’s military, with a career that stretched back to pirate hunting for the Martian Navy even before the gates opened. They studied his tactics in the academy, and Singh thought the term military genius was justifiably applied to his career.
He’d expected the private mess of an admiral and fleet commander to be larger, more luxurious than the one he claimed on the Gathering Storm. It turned out to be a table that pulled down from one bulkhead in Admiral Trejo’s slightly larger office/living quarters. The aesthetics were different only because the ship itself was.
“Sonny!” Trejo said, waiting to return his salute and then grabbing his hand and shaking it vigorously. “Finally all the pieces are in place. It’s an exciting time. Would you like to sit, or do you want the tour?”
“Admiral,” Singh replied. “If there’s a tour to be had, I’d be honored to see a little more of the ship.”
“She’s a sight, isn’t she? Call me Anton, please. No need for formality in private, and we’ll be working very closely together in the coming months. I want you to feel like you have complete freedom to speak your mind. An officer who won’t share his opinion and insight is of no use to me.”
It was an echo of the high consul allowing him to use his military title, the permission of a little familiarity in private to build a sense of approachability and rapport. Now that he’d seen it twice, he understood it would be expected of him as well.
“Thank you, sir. Anton. I appreciate that.”
“Come on along, then. It’s too large to take in all at once, but we can hit the highlights.” Admiral Trejo led the way down a short corridor to a lift that stood wider than the one on the Gathering Storm, with rounder edges that left Singh thinking of the mouth of some deep-sea fish. “I’ve been re-familiarizing myself with your career to date.”
“I’m afraid that, like most of the officers trained after the transition to Laconia, I have very little in the way of operational experience.”
The admiral waved this away. The lift door opened, and they stepped in. The anti-spalling padding on the walls was gently scalloped, like the presentiment of scales.
“Top of your class in logistics. That’s exactly what this posting will need. Me? I’m an old combat commander. Spreadsheets give me hives.”
The lift descended with a hushing sound like a million tiny bearings spinning at once, or the hiss of a sunbird. The small hairs on the back of Singh’s neck rose a little. There was something uncanny about the Tempest. Like he’d entered into a vast animal and was waiting to see its teeth.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “My orders were quite specific on—”
The admiral waved him off again. “Forget your orders for a moment. Plenty of time to get to that later. For now, I want to get to know you a little better. You have a family?”
Another point. Duarte had touched on his home life as well. Another piece of the secret teachings of Laconian command. He’d read that a command structure took its tone from those at the top. He’d never seen it so clearly in practice before. He wondered whether he’d been meant to. If this was a conscious lesson passed from Duarte to Trejo to him. He had the sense that it was.
“Yes, sir. My spouse is a nanotech scientist with the lab in Laconia City. She specializes in genetics. We have one child. Elsa.”
“Elsa. Unusual name. Very pretty.”
“My grandmother’s. Nat— Natalia, my spouse, insisted.”
The lift stopped. The doors opened on a wide and flowing deck. There were no stairs, but a gentle undulation in the deck raised some workstations above others. It seemed almost random until he saw the captain’s station that could command direct line of sight to all the flight-deck crew at once. The design was elegant and utterly unfamiliar at the same time.
The XO caught sight of them and stood at attention, surrendering command, but Trejo waved him back. The admiral was present, but not to take command.
“Connection to the past is important,” Trejo said as they walked across the gently sloping deck. “Continuity. We honor those who came before, and hope that those we bring into the world do the same for us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anton, please.”
“Anton,” Singh agreed, but knew calling the admiral by his first name would never feel natural or correct. “We almost never call her Elsa.”
“So what, if not Elsa?” the admiral asked.
“Monster. We call her Monster.”
The admiral chuckled. “Named for another grandparent?”
“No,” Singh said, then stopped. He worried that he might be oversharing, but the admiral was staring at him, waiting for the rest of the answer. “We were not really ready when Nat got pregnant. She was just finishing her postdoc, and I was doing two-and three-month patrol tours as the XO on the Cleo.”
“No one is ever ready,” the admiral said. “But you don’t know that until after it’s happened.”
“Yes. So when Elsa was born, I’d just rotated back to an administrative position, and Nat had moved to a more permanent research job, and we were both learning the ropes while a very insistent one-month-old made her demands.”
Trejo led the way down a curving ramp at the side of the room. Hatches irised open as they approached them and closed again once they’d passed. The light came from thumb-sized recesses in the wall, perfectly regular in their spacing, but rounded and soft. Organic life subjected to military engineering.
“So,” Singh continued as they walked, “we were exhausted. And one morning, at about three when Elsa started crying, Nat rolled over to me and said, ‘That monster is going to kill me.’ And that was it. She was Monster from then on.”
“But you say it with a smile now, yes?”
“Yes,” Singh agreed, thinking of his daughter’s face. “Yes, we do. And that’s why I’m here.”
“Why you’re here, hm? You don’t seem like the type of man who’d choose to go without his family.”
“It will hurt to leave them behind for this deployment. It will be months, at least, before they can join me on Medina Station. Possibly years. But if I can give my daughter the version of humanity that the high consul has planned, it will all be worth it. A galactic society of peace and prosperity and cooperation is the best legacy I can imagine for her.”
“A true believer,” the admiral said, and Singh felt a flush of shame that perhaps he appeared na?ve to the man. But when Trejo continued, there was nothing mocking in his tone. “This will only work because of the true believers.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. And then, “Anton.”
The admiral led the way into a broad corridor, larger than anything he’d ever seen designed in a ship. The Tempest didn’t have the closeness of other ships, the design constrained by the need to cut back every kilogram, to waste no space at all. It was a ship that claimed power by the shape of its walls. Singh felt a little awe at it. As he supposed he was meant to.
Two midshipmen sat at a table, laughing and flirting until they saw Trejo. The old man scowled, and the pair saluted and scurried off to their duties. Singh realized that no one had spoken to them in the time since they’d left the admiral’s cabin. The tour might seem casual, but it was intended to be private as well.