Things Fall Apart: Chapter 17
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Borass Station
Ari ben Yosef Espinoza waited in the reception area of the commodore's office. He'd already checked in with her yeoman, who had told him that Haraldsdottir's previous call had run long and begged his patience.
He found patience easy to come by. He wasn't in a hurry to have this meeting. He'd already made some decisions, and was pretty sure that they'd accord with Haraldsdottir's ideas. Still, those decisions entailed some fairly large changes for him, and even someone who prided himself on being adaptable could feel some anxiety in the face of change.
Then again...everything had changed, hadn't it.
Eight megaseconds ago, he'd been rather absurdly wealthy, for example. Wealth didn't mean quite what it had before replication had come along, but it had meant something, and he'd been raised to it. Only his time actually in Fleet service had given him a taste of what it was to be "ordinary", and it was one of the key reasons he'd done it.
Now? It was an unresolved question whether the economy in which he was considered a billionaire still existed. The family company did have offices and incorporation in some non-Tau Ceti Treaty systems, but his personal loyalties had mostly been to the Tau Ceti system itself, and Cherryh's World in particular. He'd diversified a bit, but most of his banking had been done there.
The World, being a terraformed dirtworld with minimal reliance on AIs for day-to-day, was probably fine. But it's economy was entirely entwined with the spaceborne habitats that filled the system. Unlike Gliese-581, almost all of those habitats were fully artificial constructs, like the city of New Norfolk itself had been, not rock-cities like Borass.
All of which left Espinoza with a simple question: how could he make himself useful.
His reverie was interrupted by the sound of the inner door to the commodore's office opening. To the casual eye, Haraldsdottir looked as cool and professional as any officer could hope.
Espinoza, however, knew her better than that. She was one misplaced pebble away from an avalanche. There were clear signs she'd been crying, if you knew what to look for.
He stood and met her gaze as she said, "Señor Espinoza, I'm sorry to have kept you waiting!"
He was there in civilian clothes, so the form of address was appropriate, if a bit formal for them. Then again, there was the young, presumably impressionable yeoman to keep up appearances for. So.
"Not at all, Commodore. There's a lot going on, and it doesn't all run to schedule."
She offered a polite smile. "But of course. I'm ready for you now, however." She stepped aside and gestured, and he walked into her office.
This was a game he understood well. The façade of normalcy. Here inside the rock-city itself, it was actually easy to forget that a catastrophe of untold scale was still unfolding. Even coming in to the docking core, not much evidence remained of the Incident. It had all been made to withstand the possibility of an explosive engineering casualty.
It was just that nobody had expected it to be part of a concerted attack.
In a bygone era, the station might well be suffering at this point from prolonged lack of commerce, but replication had meant that nobody went hungry, worn out parts could continue to be replaced, and so on. Entropy meant that even modern nanorecycling and recovery technology were not perfectly efficient, but the station still could have gone decades, if necessary, in isolation.
Most of the signs, therefore, were in the obvious stress of its human inhabitants. A culture used to being part of a vast interconnected network was now confined to a single system. Until Bellerophon had made it home, it must have seemed like they might never hear from the outside world again.
And in fact, that still might be true.
Forcibly, Espinoza brought his attention back to the here and now, to the commodore, his old mentor, commander, and friend. He took the proffered seat and watched as she very carefully and firmly closed the door and engaged a higher level privacy screen.
She still maintained her façade until she sat down in her own chair. Then, she let her shoulders slump as she leaned back and closed her eyes against fresh tears.
He waited. Even with the privacy enhanced, this was her office, not her quarters. They met in an as-yet-ambiguous professional capacity. There were boundaries that could only be shifted from her side of the desk.
Only when she seemed to have regained her composure and looked at him again did he say, "May one ask?"
She nodded. "It's no mystery, really. Ms. Singer made a decision in her role directing the cleanup crews that led us both to the realization that we need to actually accept reality and memorialize the dead. It's...daunting."
"Think she's up for it?"
Haraldsdottir smiled wanly, "Now, how did you guess I was putting her in charge of organizing the memorial?"
"Because I know how you like to foster talent. You never met a deep end you didn't like to throw people into."
She rewarded him with a snort and a smile. He'd hoped for an actual laugh, but it would do for the moment. "I'd be hard put to find a shallow end for anybody, right now."
"Speaking of which..."
"...you'd like to finally tell me why you asked to meet with me?"
"Yep."
"Shoot."
"I would like you to formally reinstate my commission, and assign me to Singer's future command."
Her mouth quirked in a sardonic half-smile. "What makes you think she's going to have one? Maybe I plan to just assign her to communications again, and take a ship out myself!"
Several rejoinders presented themselves to Espinoza, but he chose to simply stare at her with one eyebrow quirked.
It took her ten whole seconds to break with an actual chuckle. "Does Singer know you're this good at anticipating people?"
"She's pretty good at it, herself. So far, we get along pretty well. Now, if I'd stayed in the service, I'd almost certainly be her senior, but I didn't join the service to command. I joined the service to work, to build, to manage engines and get practical experience with them so I could eventually design better ones."
"Which you did."
"Which brings me to my next point, but out of order. Do I get my commission?"
"Considering I was poring over laws and regulations to see if I could possibly conscript you, I will definitely and with tremendous relief accept your volunteering."
He smiled, trying not to look too smug about it. "Good. Now, the second point. You obviously have a plan for the crew that doesn't involve Bellerophon itself. Dare I hope that Project Z survived intact?"
"Reading my mind twice in one conversation?"
"Not at all. I leave the mind-reading—or emotion reading, I guess is what she really does—to the skipper. But the same logic that tells me you need to stay here, and help hold this system together, tells me that if you only have one ship and one crew, it had better be a fast one. If you can only be one place at a time..."
"...then you need to get between places fast. I guess it's not that hard to follow."
"Especially when I helped design the engines for Project Z in the first place! Singer'd think of it herself if she knew anything about the project."
Haraldsdottir nodded, then looked troubled. "Ari...before I actually place you in a chain of command with her, I have to ask you: am I making a mistake? Her record is one long very clear statement of disinterest in command—not unlike your own. Even her Lieutenant Alexander has shown more of a reach for a command track."
Espinoza took a moment to think, not about the answer, but how to phrase it. "I've had a lot of time to talk with various members of Bellerophon's crew. If a single one of them even remembers Singer as she was before the Incident, you'd never know it. She's The Skipper, and only protocol has kept them from calling her 'Captain'. Some of them have even slipped in private conversation, then corrected themselves. Right this minute, I think they'd follow her off the edge of the map, dragons be damned."
"What about Alexander?"
"Can you be more specific?"
"Ze's been acting XO, and everything I see in the reports is that ze's done an excellent job, but is it what ze wants to be doing?"
"You have someone else in mind?"
"I do, actually. Someone who'd rotated here about 15 megs ago to get some seasoning before rotating into a senior slot on a ship. How much of a disruption would it be to displace Alexander?"
He thought about it. "Ze is rather enjoying getting to be a pilot more than an XO right now, from what I can see. A lot of the logistics have been on zir shoulders as well. Ze might be happy as Senior Operations Officer instead, but I'd definitely have the conversation with Singer, as well."
Haraldsdottir considered. "I could see doing that the other way around, too. The man I have in mind also came up through operations. Maybe that'd be the better way to go. Singer's already told me she'd like to attach the Almaty survivors, all three of whom were logistics personnel, so with just a little more augmentation and a senior officer, she'll have that department covered."
There was a lull as they both thought through the possibilities. Then, the commodore shrugged. "It can wait. I never did answer your question: it will be at least another megasecond before we know if Project Z is intact. The drydock is inconveniently placed—eighteenth furthest away of the twenty anti-spinward docks. But the bureaucratic bullshit that delayed that project may ultimately be a blessing. That dock, and the ship, should have been entirely quiescent during the Incident. Unless one of the rioting ships targeted it, I expect to find it in the same state we left it. At that point, if we focus our efforts, we should have the ship mostly space-worthy in about three megs."
Espinoza couldn't quite keep the wince off his face. Haraldsdottir responded to it, "I know. Every kilosecond's delay the news gets staler, the trail colder. It's a gamble. If we didn't have the prospect of your shiny new time-compressor dangling there, I'd be tempted to patch up Bellerophon and send her on her way almost immediately. If Z turns out not to be intact, or assessment shows she's not as close to ready as we think she is, we can still do that. But if it works out the way we hope..."
Espinoza finished for her, "...then Singer and the crew will still make it to David's Star sooner than Bellerophon could in her current shape, even if she left right now. Agreed. When are you going to tell Singer?"
"Not until we have an assessment of the current state of Project Z. Even mothballed, it was still need-to-know, and until we know the ship'll fly, Singer doesn't need to know."
Not for the first time, it occurred to Espinoza that they were all still playing things by a book that may no longer hold any authority over them. He was quite convinced Singer was aware of this, as well. He was less certain if Haraldsdottir had wrapped her head around it, yet.
Still, he nodded. "OK. I'll keep mum about it, but you'll understand I expect her to be cranky when she realizes I knew about it before she did."
"You know about it because you were involved with it long before the Incident or anything else. She's a smart woman. She'll figure that out."
"She is that, for certain. I wouldn't want to work for her otherwise."
Which brought the conversation around to the beginning. The commodore once again smiled. "You sure you're ready to just be a fleet officer again, and not a Space Mogul?"
"Commodore," he said, deliberately using her title and putting it on a professional basis again, "I can say with full sincerity that I have not been so sure of anything since I joined Fleet the first time. Whether it's Project Z or Bellerophon, they're going to need a fully trained and capable chief engineer. Find me a second who knows fusion cores and we're golden."
The commodore nodded. "I've got a couple of those I was thinking of sending with. Maybe both, honestly."
"Then unless Singer herself balks, I think we've got a plan."
"You know this is going to permanently blow your cover for your previous 'Fleet' persona, right?"
"I do. It was never that tight a cover, anyway. You figured it out fast enough."
"True. All right. Unless you're impatient, I'll bring it up with Singer during our meeting next Alpha Shift. She's got enough to think about right now and I want to give her some time to digest it before I dump more on her."
"I can accept that."
They stood then, and Espinoza thought they might both get through the entire meeting with their boundaries and dignity intact as he reached out to shake her hand.
Only to have her draw him into a bear hug and whisper, "You be damned careful out there, Ari."
He returned the hug with only a moment's hesitation, and responded, "I will be, Kel. Best as I know how."