* * *
The initial Staff Side meeting was held in the officers’ lounge of the Empress of Earth.
The room was decorated in the style of an 18th-century English coffee house. It had a central table with benches of coarse-grained wood, seats built into the sidewalls, and the autobar was hidden in a paneled kiosk whose pillars supported a wooden canopy.
The fireplace opposite the door was of marble, but the realistic flames were switched off for the moment Instead, holographic birds flitted across the spring-blue sky beyond windows of small, square panes.
There was no reason that the room shouldn’t have been of simple, utilitarian pattern, but the decorators who designed the public areas of the Empress of Earth hadn’t quit when that series of jobs was done.
Something that to Ran Colville was merely a little gray bird sat on the “outside ledge” of a window and chirruped in a tiny voice. Despite his tension, Ran grinned at the hologram.
His initial reaction to the period decoration had been negative. This sort of nonsense was for passengers, not for the professionals. Thirty seconds later, he found the ambiance growing on him. He didn’t especially like the dark, heavy wood and the clumsy furniture, but the lounge had character. A character, instead of featureless homogeneity that could have been interchanged with similar spaces in a thousand other ships.
Character was what made the Empress of Earth special. Passengers were attracted to her for her size, for the quality of her table and the service provided by her human and automated staff . . . but repeat customers and the word-of-mouth they provided came because passengers felt comfortable aboard the vessel.
Interstellar travel was a nerve-wracking business even for a ship’s personnel. Vessels still vanished for reasons that could only be conjectured. Perhaps catastrophic engine failure, perhaps collision with debris in the sidereal universe; perhaps a sponge-space navigational disaster that left the vessel wandering without hope of recovery or even of making a planet-fall within the limitless volumes of space.
A lifeless box, however prettily decorated, was no more reassuring than the surface pleasantry of a robot whose thought processes were both hidden and utterly inhuman. The officers’ lounge of the Empress of Earth wasn’t simply an exercise in period imitation. It had an eccentric spirit of its own.
A ship with character at all levels was likely to breed a crew whose competence protruded at the corners through their smooth veneer. Between them, they would get more custom than mere schedule-keeping and safety statistics alone would explain.
“Where’s Babanguida?” asked Commander Hiram Kneale, head of the Empress’s Staff Side. He stood in front of the kiosk, clearly ready to start the meeting.
Ran hadn’t met Kneale before. The commander was a broad man of middle height, with strong features and hair that swept back across his temples like a flow of gray cast iron. He had a resonant voice which civilized but did not conceal his irritation at the missing member of his team.
“He’s on the way, sir,” offered a senior rating with the name MOHACKS over the left breast pocket of his white uniform. “Had to make a comfort stop, is all.”
For the purpose of the meeting, the vessel’s entire Staff Side—three officers and five ratings who should have been six—was gathered in the officers’ lounge. Mohacks had a superficially open face, but Ran hadn’t missed the look of cold appraisal in the enlisted man’s eyes when he looked at the new Third Officer.
“If he’s late again,” Kneale said without bluster, “he can see how comfortable he finds the galley for however long he remains in the crew of the Empress.”
The door opened and closed again so swiftly that it was hard to imagine how the tall man with skin the color of African Blackwood had been able to slip through it during the interval. “Very sorry, Mr. Kneale,” the newcomer said. “I found a little boy in the head off the Embarkation Hall, crying his eyes out. He was trying to get into the supply closet ’cause he’d mistook it for the outside door, and his mother, she was some strict religious order and wouldn’t go into the Men’s to fetch him.”