Double Share (10 page)

“Indeed it was.”

Glancing at the door myself, to let her know I’d gotten the message, I asked softly, “Should I be concerned?”

At that moment, Ulla Nart burst into the office and whatever Arletta was about to say got side tracked.

“Beggin’ the OOD’s pardon, sar, but Spec One Otsuka requests your presence in engineering to co-sign for the refueling.”

“Thank you, Ulla,” Arletta said and stood, grabbing her tablet from the table she headed for the door while Ulla glanced shyly in my direction.

Arletta stopped at the door and looked back at me. “Yes,” she said, and left, heading aft toward the spine and engineering.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
D
IURNIA
O
RBITAL
2358-
J
ULY-7

“So, Ishmael,” Mr. Burnside asked as we settled at the wardroom table, “what do you think you should do for the next twelve stans?”

We had just relieved the OOD watch and adjourned to the wardroom to grab some lunch. Arletta was undoubtedly heading for a shower and civvies. It was our last night in port. I knew what I’d be doing in her place and wished her luck.

I sipped some of the execrable coffee to buy some time to consider. I made quite a production of it, but I already knew what I needed to do. I just didn’t want Mr. Burnside to think I did.

“Well, Mr. Burnside—”

“David, please.”

“Well, David, I really need to get up on the bridge and look over the ship’s systems. I’ve been reviewing them on my tablet, but the larger displays and computing power up there should let me get in and give them a good shake down. We’re undoubtedly due for a system back up and I’d like to double check the spares.”

He nodded, a smile of approval pasted on his face. “Good ideas. I’m not certified in systems myself, but you’re right about the backups. We’ll leave a set here in the corporate office just before getting underway.”

I kept my expression attentive. I wasn’t sure what the point of an off ship backup might have served in this situation. If anybody needed that data after we got underway, it would undoubtedly not be anybody aboard the ship. A failure of that magnitude would most likely be fatal. It was a common practice throughout the fleet, so I didn’t question it.

After a moment of shared silence while we ate, he continued, “You’ve reviewed the standing orders for OOD, I assume.”

“Yes, David, I have.”

“Excellent. Then, why don’t you relieve me and take over the watch when we get done with lunch. It’ll be good for you to have the watch once before we get underway.” He paused. “You’ve stood bridge watch, I assume?”

“Oh, yes, many times. Summer cruises are mostly bridge watch.”

“Well, yes, but if they were anything like my summer cruises, you had an experienced officer on hand so you weren’t actually on your own while on the bridge.”

“True enough,” I admitted.

I didn’t contradict him in anything. He was going to have to put me on bridge watch and the only question was who and how much babysitting I’d get before they trusted me with the ship by myself. In a lot of ways, being underway was a lot less demanding than being in port. He knew that, of course, but it wasn’t my place to point it out.

“Anything else you think we should do in this last watch before getting underway, Ishmael?”

I thought for a moment before replying, “There wasn’t anything in the standing orders. I’m assuming that the various ship’s stores and services need to be checked and verified…?”

He nodded. “Excellent,” he said again with a broad—and patently false—smile. “Let’s get on with the watch then, shall we?”

“Certainly,” I said, then stood, collected my dirty dishes, and placed them in the tray at the sideboard.

“I told you that you didn’t need to do that, Ishmael,” David said chidingly. “You’re going to make the messmates think you’re taking their jobs.”

“Old habits die hard,” I said as off-handedly as I could.

He just tsked and shook his head. “A good officer knows when to delegate.”

“A sound lesson, David,” I agreed. “Shall we get the watch swapped over, and I’ll go up to the bridge?”

It was funny, really. I felt so off balance until Burnside signed me onto the OOD watch. I’d had my share of them at the academy and in-port duty held no terrors. Once the mantle of watch stander fell on my shoulders, I suddenly felt centered. I ran through a series of system queries to check basic ship status from the office while Burnside looked on. He soon grew bored watching me flick through screens.

With an off-hand, “I’ll be in my stateroom if you need me, Ishmael,” he left me to my own devices.

As soon as he left, I shut down the terminal, used my tablet to bip the messenger of the watch, Mr. Apones, and asked him to meet me at the brow. Apones and the gangway watch stander, Steven Mallory if the watch roster was correct, were waiting for me. They stopped talking as I approached, and Apones looked as if he’d swallowed something sour.

There wasn’t a hands breadth between them in terms of physical build—both squat, bull necked, and broad shouldered. Apones looked older than Mallory, although Mallory carried the rank. I wondered if Apones had lost his stripes somewhere along the line. In my brief time aboard, I hadn’t really had time to review the full jackets of everybody on the ship, but I made a mental note that I should do so as soon as I could.

“Gentlemen,” I said, smiling as I approached the station. “Mr. Burnside has signed the watch over to me, and I just wanted to check in with you both. I’ll be working on the bridge getting the system backups going. Is there anything going on in the ship that I should know about?”

Apones and Mallory glanced at each other in confusion.

“Sar?” Mallory asked.

“I’ve got the watch. I’d like to know if either of you two have seen or heard anything that’s going on in the ship that would preclude my going to the bridge,” I tried again.

Apones actually sniggered. “You’re the officer, sar. Ain’t that your job to know?”

I dredged up my best Alys Giggone stare and leveled it at him.

“Yes, Mr. Apones, it is. So I’ve asked the two crewmen aboard who are tasked with having that information—your report, Mr. Apones?”

“My report?” he looked confused and a little off-balance.

Again he and Mallory exchanged glances.

“Thank you, Mr. Apones, that tells me what I needed to know.”

I turned to Mallory who was not trying to hide his amusement over his shipmate’s discomfort. “Mr. Mallory? Your report please?”

“No unauthorized entry or attempts since I took the watch, sar. The captain and second mate are ashore. First mate, chief engineer and cargo boss are all aboard. Crew is at liberty until 09:00 tomorrow,” he rattled off.

“Thank you, Mr. Mallory,” I said. “I’ll be on the bridge running system checks and backups, probably until chow time. Mr. Burnside has retired to his stateroom. If you’d be so kind as to notify me of anything requiring the OOD’s attention?”

“You have the watch. Mr. Burnside is in his stateroom. Aye, sar,” Mallory replied.

“Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate your time.”

I turned to head up to the bridge.

As I walked away, I noticed Apones and Mallory carefully not saying anything. When I got to the first dogleg and disappeared from view, I heard Apones start to laugh. It wasn’t a happy sound.

I sighed and kept going for the bridge.

The bridge wasn’t deserted when I got there. I half expected it to be. According to the ship’s standing orders, the engineering watch was held in the after engineering space. There really was no need to keep a bridge watch with the ship moored. So it was with some surprise that I found Ms. Menas, the engineering chief, and an astrogation spec two with the name De Silva on her suit. They were each sitting at separate stations. Ms. Menas had a schematic of the ship up on her screens while I recognized the standard astrogation update screen running on De Silva’s.

Ms. Menas smiled when she saw me step onto the bridge and De Silva looked up from her screen with a fearful look on her face. She seemed confused for a moment and looked over her shoulder to Ms. Menas.

“Mr. Wang, what brings you to the bridge,” the engineer asked. “I figured that Mr. Burnside would have you reviewing standing orders until we got underway.”

The grin on her face indicated that she was amused rather than being critical.

“After last night, he’s behaving like I’m his best friend. He signed over the OOD watch to me and went to his stateroom.”

I turned to De Silva and held out my hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Ishmael Wang, the new third.”

She stood at her station and took my hand briefly, looking at me with something akin to astonishment.

“Binaca Consuela Garcia De Silva, specialist second, astrogation,” she announced smoothly.

I smiled. “Nice to meet you, Ms. De Silva. Some of my best friends have been astrogators.” I nodded at her screen. “Running updates?”

She seemed a bit surprised. “Yes, sar, tedious work but it needs to be done.”

“You’re still copy and pasting?” I asked.

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You’ve grabbed the downloads and now you’re copying and pasting the changes into the database?” I said.

“Oh, yes, sar.”

“Let me get myself settled, Ms. De Silva, and I think we can lighten your load on that score. In the meantime, I need to get backups running. Don’t let me interrupt.”

She turned back to her station and settled into the chair.

Ms. Menas watched the exchange and winked at me as she went back to studying the screen in front of her.

I looked around and identified the main systems console through the expedience of a large label reading “Main Systems Console” on the cabinet. In a matter of ten ticks, I had the system backups cycling and went down to the systems vaults under the bridge to load a rack of removable media. Some ships just replicated the system onto a “hot backup,” that is, a separate computer that could be swapped quickly in case of data problems. The
Tinker
didn’t have that kind of system redundancy so it relied on backup drives and removable storage.

When I was satisfied that the backups were spooling properly to the removable drives, I went back to the bridge to check on other systems. They all looked nominal. Communications channels seemed to be performing properly. The major electronic systems were largely off-line at the dock, but from what I saw, looked fine. I ran a quick scan of the environmental systems, propulsion systems, and on-board network status. By the time I finished with those, the backups had still only run about a third of the way. I sighed and went back to my system’s survey.

After another half a stan, my console beeped to let me know the first set of backups were done, so I set about securing the logs and checking my own system updates. With less than a day before we headed out into the Deep Dark, I wanted to be sure I had all my chips in a row.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE
D
IURNIA
O
RBITAL
2358-
J
ULY-7

The afternoon sped by. Between the system checks and updates, brainstorming with Ms. “Call me Mel” Menas, and all the associated running up and down ladders from the bridge, to storage lockers, to data closets, I felt like I’d earned my pay. It felt good.

At 17:30 I secured my station on the bridge and made a tour of the ship. I pulled up the ship’s environmental sensor net and made the rounds as if I were on a sensor watch tour. The sensor net is uniformly distributed bow to stern. Only the inside of the big cargo pod lacked sensors. It was my first real opportunity to go from bow to stern and examine every area in the ship. There was almost nobody aboard. It was the last night in port on a four-day stay, and everybody who could go ashore had gone ashore.

As I strolled through the various passageways and clambered up and down ladders, I found the same level of crud. It wasn’t that the ship was filled with trash or anything, but there were little things, like smudged light switches and built up dirt in the corners and crevices. Almost every hand rail on every ladder had some kind of deposit on it—oil, dirt, paint. It was disconcerting.