2352-FEBRUARY-19
I left Pip going over his notes and looking into dye for Dunsany. I was tired, and it was already late, but I needed to release some of the tension that had been building all day, so I headed for the gym. After a dozen laps on the track, I baked myself in the sauna and let the day just slip away. I felt strange. When I first came aboard, I knew as little about mess duty then, as I did about working in environmental now. Perhaps less, because when I interviewed with the captain back on Neris, I did not even know what job I was applying for. The only thing I was pretty sure about was that it was likely to be dirty, boring, and unpleasant. It turned out to be none of those and I smiled to myself remembering my early weeks aboard and thinking about how much things had changed.
Way back in the beginning, I remembered Cookie telling me that I should consider what path I wanted to take before I found myself being forced down one not of my own choosing. The captain had given me a choice. I could have stayed on the mess deck, except of course, I could not. Somehow, though, I did not feel like I was being forced. At least not like the way I was when I needed to get off Neris. It just seemed as if Lois needed me to move to environmental and that made the other options irrelevant.
That thought must have been bothering me, because once I came to the realization, I suddenly felt as if a weight had been lifted. I headed for the showers then to my bunk. I had the duty in the morning and it could possibly be the last day I woke as a member of the Steward Division.
When I got back to the berthing area, I discovered that Rebecca Saltzman, a spec three in the power section, was one of my new bunkies. She was sprawled in the lower across from me. Rebecca was obviously from a heavy-G planet. Where Brill was tall and willowy, Rebecca was short and powerful. She looked like she could bench press a shuttle craft, but she also had a delicate and angelic face—heart-shaped with what my mother would have called good structure. Rebecca also had the most amazingly sexy voice—halfway between a guttural purr and a growl. It was not some affectation but rather an artifact of her high-G home planet. She also had a liquid laugh that could turn heads at twenty meters. I liked Rebecca, but I did not know her that well—other than seeing her on the mess line.
“Hey!” she said with a smile when she saw me come in. “I wondered if that was your gear up there. I saw you up at the booth with Brill and heard you’d transferred into the division.”
“Yup. That okay?” I asked, nodding toward my bunk.
“You bet. You don’t snore do you?”
I laughed. “I don’t know, but Pip’s never complained about it.”
“Well, if he hasn’t complained, you’re probably okay,” she said with mock ruefulness.
“Who’s in here?” I asked indicating the lower under mine. It was the only other bunk taken in the quad.
“Mitch. You know him? Fitzroy—machinist over in propulsion?”
“Medium height, brown hair, about twenty-five?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s him. Of course, that also describes about half the men on the ship. Whatever happened to tall, dark, and handsome as a description?”
We laughed and I realized that everything was going to be okay.