Firestar
Copyright© 2009 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 4
Corey came to attention in front of Second Officer Kendricks, who was standing outside the Captain’s Conference Room. “Captain Johnson wanted to see me.” She was a little annoyed. She’d been in a meeting with First Officer Sharapova about the letter she’d received from the clerks when Captain Johnson had summoned her. Now she wasn’t sure if that issue would ever get resolved.
Officer Kendricks, one of Captain Johnson’s staff officers, nodded. “The Captain’s expecting you. Before you go in, Andersen, I have to warn you: there’s a man in there.”
“A man?” Corey didn’t know what to say. Men? She knew, on a theoretical level, that there were men in Space. The Idenux were men, well, they were male-gendered humans, but nobody thought of them as men, at least in the Families sense. She knew other space-faring systems routinely sent their men into Space, something unthinkable in the Families.
“Men,” Corey repeated. She licked her lips and wiped her hands on her uniform. “The Captain told me to report here, she didn’t say anything about men.”
Second Officer Kendricks nodded sympathetically. “She has her reasons, Andersen. The Captain of that foreign ship you saved is in there with her, and I think she wants you to meet him.”
Corey gaped at Officer Kendricks. “All ... all right.” She straightened up. “I--I guess ... all right, I think I can do that.”
“If you can’t,” Officer Kendricks said, “she’ll understand. Have you ever met a man before?”
Corey shook her head. “No, never.”
“I did, once, but my mother is the Family Eugenicist, and I met him when I thought I wanted to be a biologist. That’s before I got caught up in the war.” She opened the hatch and stepped aside. “Go on in.”
Corey kept her eyes fixed on Captain Johnson as she marched into the conference room. The Captain and another officer were sitting on one side of a table, and someone in a white uniform was sitting directly across from the Captain.
“Reporting as ordered, Ma’am,” Corey said as she came to attention and saluted.
“Have a seat, Squadron Lead.” Captain Johnson indicated an empty chair on her side of the table. “Commander Young, may I present Squadron Lead Corey Andersen. She was one of the pilots who fought beside you. Squadron Lead, this is Commander Alan Young of the People’s Star Kingdom Navy.”
“Pleased to meet you, Squadron Lead,” a deep voice said in heavily accented Standard.
Corey forced herself to look at the man sitting across from her. She had never seen a man before, only holopics. They failed to capture the totality of the experience. He was so ... he was... different. The analytical part of her mind tried to catalogue what those differences were, and failed. She forced herself to take a mental step back and try again.
The man had dark blonde hair, blue eyes, and a lean face, not unlike Svetlana’s. But the differences leaped out at her: he was taller and broader across the shoulders, and there was something about his face that looked harder. His hands were bigger, and his shoulders looked powerful. She gulped and forced herself to pay strict attention to his face.
“You’ve been hurt,” she managed to say in a lull in the conversation. The scar above his left eye was fresh. Perhaps he had been wounded in the fight against the Idenux.
“It’s nothing,” he said, dismissing her concern. “It’s one of the hazards of the trade.”
She wanted to reach out and brush the lock of hair away from his injury. By sheer force of will, she forced her hands to stay in her lap. She took another breath to settle her nerves.
“I was surprised there was anyone still alive on your ship, Commander. You were really badly shot up, and I could see fires burning all through the hull.”
“It was close,” he said. His eyes lost their focus momentarily. “I want to thank you for your intervention. It came just in time. If you hadn’t jumped into the fight, I might not be sitting here.”
Even his voice was different, Corey thought. It wasn’t the accent, strange as that was. No, there was something about the way his voice rumbled with certain words and seemed to vibrate deep inside her.
Captain Johnson said something, and Corey forced herself to pay attention.
“Aside from medical assistance,” Captain Johnson said, “is there anything else we can offer you? I know our equipment will be incompatible with yours, but we have a repair ship in our support squadron, and those gals are among the best we have at fixing problems.”
“Thank you, Captain,” the man said. “If we do encounter something beyond our means, I will let you know.” He paused for a sip of water. “Will you be in this system long?”
“The Idenux may counterattack,” Captain Johnson said. She shrugged as if to say that was of no particular significance. “They don’t always. Sometimes they cut their losses when we seize a system. But this one had a substantial ship repair facility, and they may want to fight for that.”
She looked at Commander Young and Squadron Lead Andersen. Blood had rushed to Andersen’s face, and she was visibly trying to look anywhere but at Commander Young.
A musical chime filled the compartment. Recognizing her ‘call’, Captain Johnson dropped her hand to the shunt pad again.
“Captain Johnson.”
“Ma’am, Fourth Officer Rodrigues reports she can accomplish the mission you outlined. She has already acquired a dozen workable genome samples from the wounded her team has been treating on that foreign ship. She’s returning from the Spatha, Ma’am, and will be at Dock #4 in five minutes.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Captain Johnson pushed herself back from the table. “If you will excuse me, Commander Young, something has come up that I must see to personally. Squadron Lead, I would be most appreciative if you would entertain Commander Young until I get back.”
“B--be glad to, Ma’am.” Corey swallowed and wiped her sweaty palms on her legs. She looked around the room, wondering if she was going to be left alone with a man. But the other officer at the table gave her a reassuring smile. Corey smiled back; she wouldn’t be left alone with this strange creature.
Alan Young studied the young woman sitting across from him. On one hand, he wanted to slide his chair closer, lean forward, and do his best to charm her. But she looked no older than the schoolgirls he saw back on New Republic, and her eyes looked like those of a freshly cornered wild animal. He edged his chair slightly away from the table, moving back from her, trying to signal his intent to keep his distance.
“Is there something wrong?” he finally asked.
Corey smiled hesitantly. “Not really,” she said. “It’s just...” She tried to figure out how to explain something so basic to her, something that was undoubtedly foreign to him: he was a man.
Third Officer Karen Ramson had been sitting on the other side of Captain Johnson. “Commander Young,” she said, “I think part of the problem is that men are a rarity in our culture. Only the Commercial Service and Eugenicists have any regular contact with them.”
“I see. I wondered where the men were on this ship.”
“They’re at home where they’re safe. Aside from that, I was wondering what a People’s Star Kingdom is? I know, from history courses, what Kings are. Are the people the rulers? Are the Kings chosen from the people? And if so, how does that work? Wouldn’t there be chaos with so many rulers?”
“We have a King,” Alan said, relaxing in his chair, “and he’s a hereditary monarch. But the King doesn’t rule, not directly. He’s more of a uniting force and chief executive. There’s a parliament for each planet, and one in our capital for our whole government. The King rules through them, but only with their advice and consent. Mostly, he’s the one who sorts out problems and makes final decisions when they’re needed. And he also the chief executive of the government, which gives him a lot of indirect power.”
“It sounds complicated,” Officer Ramson said.
Alan shrugged. “We’re a diverse people. We want to give every voice a chance to be heard. Outsiders say the way we govern ourselves is too complicated to last, but it’s worked for several hundred years.”
Officer Ramson nodded. “If the people are happy with their government, what else can you ask?”
“Oh, that the government does things for the people that they can’t do easily: health care, education, support in bad times, things like that.” Alan looked at Officer Ramson. “Your government does that, of course.”
“Most of that is done by each Family,” Corey said.
“Each family?” Alan looked surprised. “If every family does that, isn’t there a lot of duplication of effort?”
“I think we mean different things by Family,” Officer Ramson said, smiling. “How big are your Families?”
Alan thought a moment. “Umm, a family usually has the man, the woman, and whatever children they have, usually three or four.”
Officer Ramson nodded. “Our Families range in size from about 50,000 for the smallest Family to over a million in the largest.”
Alan blinked in surprise. “A million?” He wanted to ask more, but he wasn’t even sure how to phrase the question.
“Each Family is divided into several Septs,” Officer Ramson continued, “and then there can be sub-Septs, Clans, and so on. Except for Septs, each Family is free to organize themselves however they want.”
“But--” Alan stopped, confused. “We may have had that at one time in our history. Back when the PSK was confined to a single planet, there were families who owned vast tracts of land and directly controlled the lives of the people who lived there. The nobility has, for the most part, faded away, except for ceremonial purposes. I think that would be the closest equivalent.”
Officer Ramson shrugged. “We organized ourselves this way because it was the most efficient way to terraform and settle the planet. Everything else since then has happened by experimenting to see what worked. In many ways, we’re a very practical people. We’ve had to be.”
“You terraformed your planet? How long did that take?”
“It took us nearly 500 years before our planet was fit enough to settle. We’re not finished with it, either. It’s one of those ongoing projects that will employ our descendants many years from now.”
“We settled on a fairly benign planet,” Alan said. “It was going--” He stopped as the hatch opened and Captain Johnson entered. He noted that neither the young pilot nor Officer Ramson rose to attention, something unthinkable in the PSK Navy.
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