hardly gone out on a station dock or seen anything in the universe but the
inside of Dublin’s compartments and corridors. The king of the universe was the
Old Man who sat in the chair and captained Dublin, the Number One mainday
captain, who ruled it all.
Be reasonable, Megan had told her then, taking her in the circle of her arm,
setting her on the edge of the bed in her quarters and trying to talk sense into
her. Only one gets to be the Old Man; and you know how many try the course and
fail? Maybe one in four survives the grade to get into the line; and one in
fifty gets to Helm 24, up where you’re even going to sit a chair on watch; and
after that, age is against you, because the sitting captains are too young. You
go ask in library, Allie, how long the sitting captains are going to live, and
then you do the math and figure out how long the number two chairs are going to
live after taking their posts behind them, and how long it takes for Helm 24 to
work up to posted crew.
Can’t I try? she had asked. And: yes, you can try, Megan had said. I’m only
telling you how it is.
Maybe there’ll be an accident, she had thought to herself, with a ten-year-old’s
ruthless ambition: an accident to wipe out everyone in Second Helm.
You study everything, Megan had said, when she had complained about learning
galley maintenance; the Helm course fits you for everything. So if you fail, you
drop into whatever other track you’re passing. You think Helm’s just sitting in
that chair: it’s trade and routings; law; navigation and scan and com and
armaments; it’s jack and jill of all trades, Allie, ma’am, and doing all the
scut before you hand it out, and you can always quit, Allie, ma’am.
No, ma’am, she had said, and swallowed all they gave her, reckoning to be
stubbornest the longest, and to make it all the way, because there was a
craziness in her, that once launched, she had a kind of inertia that refused to
be hauled down. She was Helm 21, and when Val retired as she was likely to, Helm
6 and on the fading edge of rejuv, she would be Helm 20, and one more Dubliner
got a post as Helm 24. She walked wide among the unposteds, being Helm. It had
its perks. But Lallie, over there, Maintenance 196, was Second Maintenance
second shift alterday at barely twenty-one, posted main crew before her hair
grayed, while Helm 21 had little chance indeed, with a possible forty years
until another seated Helm decided to give it up and retire. She would be on
rejuv before the list got her past Helm 20, would still be lording it over the
unposteds, silver-haired and still not able to cross the line into the posteds
lounge, still waiting, still working the number two bridge to stay current.
She shut her eyes, leaned back, seeing blue dock again, and soldiers in their
black uniforms. They talked about opening up Sol trade, shut down since the war;
about opening the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. They talked new
routes and profits to be made—putting their hand into Alliance territory,
creating a loop that would link the Union stars to the Pell-based Alliance.
Trade and politics.
So much she knew, sitting in on Dublin executive councils, which was all of Helm
and only sitting crew of other tracks. She knew all the debate, whether Dublin
should take the chance, whether they should just sit out the building and wait
for the accomplished fact; but Dublin had always stood with one foot on either
side of a crisis, always poised herself ready to move to best advantage, and the
Merchanter’s Alliance, once an association of merchanter captains who disputed
Union, now held the station at Pell’s Star for a capital, declared itself a
sovereign government, passed laws, in short… looked like a power worth having a
foot inside. A clean record with Union; a clean record with the Alliance thus
far, since Dublin had operated far out of the troubled zones during the war—she