The Sirens of Space by Jeffrey Caminsky Read Free Book Online Page B

for their own partisan advantage,
there was nothing anyone could do. Even a fleet admiral’s hands
were tied by politics, from time to time, and once again he would
bow to the inevitable.
    But not first thing in the morning, the
admiral thought. He relaxed into the soft cushions of his chair,
remembering what it was like to be a young, promising skipper with
his whole future before him, and wondering whether the fleet
commanders of his youth had Weatherlees of their own to contend
with. Perhaps the headaches always came with the job, he sighed.
The gentle hiss of the ventilator dulled his senses and brought a
deceptive peace to his troubled mind. He turned to his console; it
was 375 Hours, and the available weekly reports should be in by
now. He would make his decisions later. It was time to learn how
his men and women spent their time for the last ten days. He turned
the screen to the priority index; he would worry about Weatherlee
some other time.
     
    * * *
    The Old Earth-vintage chandeliers lit the tables with soft, diffuse light. The
table orbs glowed dimly, giving a gentle warmth to the room. The
rich texture of the wallpaper captured pastoral scenes from
Victorian England, of foxes and hounds, and gentry at play. It was
the Country Club, the finest restaurant on Ishtar Command, where
the gentry of the Eastern Fleet could come to relax in comfort and
spend their money at leisure.
    In the hallway connecting the annex to the
main dining area, Henri looked nervously at Table Forty-seven,
where he had placed the three CosGuard officers almost two solar
hours ago, when the annex had been empty. But when the shift change
brought the dinner crowd, he had no choice but to begin seating
patrons wherever he had an available table. To his eternal
mortification, that meant seating men and women of refinement next
to common spacers.
    Worse, he shuddered: they were starship
captains, probably freshly returned from deep space and ready to
shatter the Club’s reputation into a thousand tiny pieces.
    Suddenly, Table Forty-seven erupted in
laughter, and Henri saw one of their number—the one with the
roguish eyes and the piercing laugh; he believed the name was
Tanana—slap his thigh. Throughout the annex, more than one head
turned toward the spacers, only to turn away with disdain.
    By the time the next eruption came, this
time on the heels of a large and unmistakable belch, Henri could
stand it no longer. With a face as red as his jacket, he retired to
the service lounge. He would leave Maurice to greet their guests.
Maurice was an Earther, and Earthers were used to humiliation.
     
    “Well, Fitz, you sure drew
the brass ring on that one. Dream as they will, not everyone gets
to serve under Miriam Wright.”
    “ You know, Fitz keeps plugging away,
but sooner or later he seems to hit the mark.”
    Ignoring temptation, Brian Fitzgerald
stuffed another bite of dinner into his mouth. An unkempt mop of
graying hair sat atop his head, and mustard lined the corners of
his mouth. His eyes crackled with a blunt and practical
intelligence, and behind his hearty sense of humor his friends
found him the very essence of sturdy honesty. Like most Demetrians
he was strong and stocky, with a ready smile and an irreverence
born of hard times and working-class roots. His reputation, though,
came from his scrappiness as a battler, and the fact that his
starship was hardly the most graceful on the frontier. His
maneuvers were often compared to a Ceresian mutluk in heat, and
Fitz himself had to admit that he lacked the artistry of a
Jefferson McKinley Jones, DemCom’s senior wing commander.
    But graceful or not, he got the job done, no
matter what the grading computers thought of his style. For now, he
was too hungry to match insults with Tanana and Chandler, his
friends from their days together at CosGuard Tech. And he was too
pleased at the duty rotation to feel like doing anything but
enjoying himself. Any duty that kept him away from “Whinin’