Babanguida met Kneale’s glare with warm, brown eyes as innocent as those of a puppy wagging its tail from the middle of a puddle of urine. After a moment, the commander said in a neutral tone, “Good to have you with us again, Babanguida.” Kneale hadn’t forgotten anything, wasn’t promising anything. He was just holding the matter in abeyance.
He cleared his throat “Very well,” he began. “Most of us know one another already, but there are two new faces. Crewman Second Class Blavatsky—stand up, Blavatsky.”
A plump woman in her mid-20s obeyed, smiling nervously, and sat back down again on one of the seats along the bulkhead.
“Blavatsky has transferred to us from Ship Side, so perhaps some of you know her already,” Kneale continued. “She’ll be on my watch. And we have a new Third Officer, Lieutenant Randall Colville. Yes, that’s right, stand up.”
Ran rose, meeting the eyes of his fellows with a swift deliberation that acknowledged everyone but didn’t delay the proceedings. He nodded to the commander and seated himself again on the bench across the central table from Wanda Holly.
“I understand you’ve been running Colville through his paces already, Ms. Holly?” Kneale said.
“He was in his whites, so I let him field calls while I changed from fatigues,” Wanda said with a smile. “There weren’t any problems. He can do my work any time.”
“Passengers are pretty much passengers, whichever side of the galaxy,” Ran said easily. “The only tricky one was the family of K’Chitkans who wanted to disembark on the crew car—”
“How did you handle that?” Kneale said, responding with the quick certainty of an autoloader returning to battery after a shot.
“The birds?” Ran said. K’Chitkans were thick-bodied and had large heads, but their distant ancestors had once flown. They didn’t look particularly birdlike in Earth terms, but males had a crest of tall feathers and vestigial beaks were common among both sexes. “Well, frankly, I loaded them into a crew car, went over with them, and made sure they got on the drop shaft to the passenger level. They’d booked the Asoka Suite. I decided that was enough of an outlay for Trident Starlines to live with a kink in the rules.”
Kneale smiled crisply. “A good decision,” he said. There was no emotional loading in his voice. The message was in the words themselves. That sort of man was dangerous, because it was easy to believe that he didn’t mean what he said . . .
“Very good . . .” the commander repeated. “Mr. Colville, the ratings on your watch are Crewmen First Class Mohacks and Babanguida. They’re experienced men. You’ll find them capable of dealing with most situations without calling for help . . . but the responsibility is of course yours.”
“Yessir,” Ran said. He didn’t look toward the crewmen, but he knew the type well enough to imagine the air of bland appraisal with which they stared at his back.
Mohacks and Babanguida were clever, intelligent career enlisted men. They’d have their scams and fiddles which earned them several times the salary Trident Starlines paid them, and they’d think they were smarter than the officers who were their titular superiors.
What Mohacks and Babanguida weren’t were officers. They would never understand why some folk gave orders and they obeyed, for all their intelligence and experience. They thought it was education or class or pull . . . and all of those things had an effect; but the difference in mindset between those who led and those who didn’t was more basic than background.
Mohacks and Babanguida were going to survive, because they were smart and skilled and kept a low profile by avoiding responsibility. They didn’t want rank, because they didn’t think it was real the way what they had was real: wealth and comfort and freedom in their terms.
Most of the folk who worked their way off Bifrost on starships died in the Cold Crews, or died on shore as flotsam washed up on the shores of sponge space. A Bifrost boy who cheated his way from the Cold Crew of an unscheduled freighter to Trident Starlines’ Officers Academy couldn’t imagine how someone else could stop because he felt comfortable. Comfort wasn’t an option on Bifrost, only survival.