Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [44]
Ben Zoma chose his words carefully. “I take it the captain of your previous ship was a precise observer of regulations?”
She nodded. “Of course. Captain Rudolfini was an excellent officer.”
Obviously, Wu wasn’t going to make it easy for him—not that he had expected her to. “At the risk of being considered a bad officer,” he said, “I have to tell you that we do things differently here on the Stargazer. We don’t always adhere strictly to regulations, especially when they bump heads with common sense.”
The second officer didn’t say anything. She just sat there and listened to him.
“And as far as I can tell,” Ben Zoma continued, “we’re not unusual in that respect. Most captains will overlook minor violations if they don’t interfere with overall efficiency—especially when they’re seen in the context of a difficult mission.”
Wu just looked at him.
“Therefore,” he told her, “I would appreciate it if you let up on Simenon and Idun and whoever else among your subordinates may have been guilty of a minor infraction. Of course, if you see something seriously wrong, don’t hesitate to correct it. But it’s got to be more than a failure to requalify or the odd double shift.”
Ben Zoma expected an argument from his second officer. To his surprise, he didn’t get one.
“I’ll obey your orders,” Wu told him evenly, “if that’s what they are. But I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I sincerely and wholeheartedly disagree with them.”
He sighed. He had been right about Wu, it seemed—she was going to be trouble after all.
Jiterica dutifully moved her containment suit along the corridor in the direction of her quarters. However, the suit wasn’t the heaviest burden she had to carry with her.
When Lieutenant Simenon mentioned the similarity between the field in the ensign’s suit and the barriers employed in the brig, he had only meant that they drew on the same technology. But Jiterica had come to the conclusion that the similarity extended well beyond that.
After all, her containment field was a means of incarceration as well, in that it kept her from assuming the form nature had intended for her. And there were other prisons into which she had blithely and willingly placed herself.
The Stargazer, for instance, in that it carried her far from the milieu into which she had been born. And the vows she had made as a member of Starfleet, for they kept her from living a life in which she could find meaning.
To this point, she had managed to fool herself. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, she had convinced herself that she might thrive in Starfleet—that she might even manage to become a viable officer someday. But her experiences on the Stargazer had finally put an end to that notion.
First, there was the embarrassment in the shuttlebay, where she had placed others in peril by virtue of her very existence. True, it was only theoretical peril, but the next time it might be real.
Then she had suffered an even greater embarrassment by nearly exploding her containment suit in the brig. As Simenon had indicated, the situation wasn’t likely to come up a second time, but how many other venues on the ship would prove inimical to her survival?
What further humiliation would she have to endure before she accepted the inevitable—before she resigned herself to the grim reality of her prospects on the Stargazer?
Just as Jiterica thought this, she saw someone round the bend in the corridor ahead of her. It was a human, older than most on the ship—a female with a greater body mass than the statistical average, her hair worn loose about her shoulders.
Jiterica didn’t remember meeting the woman. However, it was clear that she was a lieutenant, because there was a spool-shaped device pinned onto the right shoulder and left sleeve of her uniform. It was also clear that she worked in the science section, because those same devices were at least partly gray in color.
A full lieutenant in the science section, Jiterica thought. That would be Lieutenant Valderrama. The woman had beamed up to the ship with