This choice: Continue reading "Double Double" • Go Back...Chapter #37Double Double (12) by: Seuzz   Chapter 12
WHEN VEDRA'S DOOR SLID OPEN, Jamal was standing there. The corridor lights cast a glimmer of gold across his flawless ebony skin.
"Hello Gauri," he said. "May I come in?"
Stone-faced, she nodded.
He took a step in, and paused. Frowned, as the door closed behind him.
"Chin was right," he said. "You really are upset with me."
She shrugged. What could she say? She didn't own him. He was a starship officer, as was she. Friendship, she'd found before, had its limits.
Like the machines she tended. Not even they remained constant.
"I did see you down in the transporter room," he said by way of apology. "But the captain had me so ... so worked up, I didn't know if I was coming or going."
That much was probably true, Vedra thought. Banks's ... complicated ... relationship with Martinez was the cause of a lot of the turmoil he put himself through.
"Still," she replied, trying to keep the pique out of her voice, "you've been back a full day, and not even a word of hello."
He had no one else to say hello to. On the entire ship, she was his only real friend. But she didn't see fit to remind of that.
Banks sighed.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I forget sometimes that you have feelings too. You seem like such a rock." He shrugged. "It didn't occur to me that I could upset you."
"Forget it," she said. "What's done is done. Why don't you pull up a chair and tell me what you found down there."
He smiled, but instead walked over to her collection of exotic liqueurs instead, and poured two drinks.
"First," he said, "a toast. To my transfer."
Vedra's anger dropped away suddenly, to replaced by something closer to fear. "It came through?"
"Yes. A new assignment—on the Potemkin. It doesn't become effective for a few weeks yet, but it's official."
"Jamal," she said, trying to force happiness into her voice. "I"m so glad for you!"
He turned back to her with the glasses. One held a ruby-red liquid—Mratakken brandy, her favorite. The other held an amber liquid—Terran whiskey.
"I knew you would be." He smiled like a child. "This is a big opportunity for me, Gauri. I can do great things on the Potemkin, I know it."
It was odd to hear such a swelling self-confidence from Jamal, who was more likely to flagellate himself with self-criticism. But as she'd grown to know him, Gauri had begun to guess that the self-flagellation was the flip-side of a self-confidence that had fewer opportunities to express itself. Both were manifestations of Jamal's ambition.
"Their gain, our loss," Gauri said as she took the brandy. She winced inwardly at what even to her sounded like a veiled comment on her own, genuine reaction to news of his transfer. "You should have been able to do great things here on the Hood."
She lifted her glass to toast him, but faltered when she saw the look of pain and anger in his eyes.
"I never could figure out what Martinez has against me," he said in a hoarse voice, his expression tightening. "The way he rides me—"
He swung around to glare at Gauri, so hard that she almost took a step back.
"Do you know what the problem is he has with me?" he demanded. "You've never told me, never even told me that you had any idea what it could be. But now that I've got the transfer in hand— Gauri, why does Captain Martinez hate me?"
The chief engineer found she couldn't break eyes with Banks. She felt the force of his anger pushing at her, and she marveled that he could possess such force. Despite her reluctance, she finally felt herself crumpling beneath the weight of his gaze, and when she faltered it was less a surrender and more of a relief.
"It was on account of Althea," she said quietly. "Your predecessor."
"The one who died of the Saurian fever."
"Yes. You replaced her as science officer. But you couldn't replace ... her."
She lifted her eyes to look Jamal in the face. "You were as good as she was as a science officer. But she meant more than that to Joaquin."
Banks returned her glance with a steady stare of his own, then turned to drop with a startling quickness onto the settee, where sat hunched over with his hands and glass between his knees.
"That was unfair," he said with quiet venom.
"Jamal, I—"
"I don't mean you," he said. "I asked you and you told me. And I don't blame you for keeping it from me. Gossip about other officers is—" He looked up, sharply. "Does everyone else on the ship know?"
"Know what? About Joaquin and Althea?" She quailed a little at the way his jaw clenched. "Not everyone, Jamal, not the technicians down in—"
"All the officers, though!"
"It was common knowledge," Gauri allowed.
Jamal's mouth twisted into a bitter smile.
"So they all knew," he sneered. "And they all knew why Martinez— They all looked at me and they all said to themselves, He can replace her on the bridge, but he can't replace her in—"
"Jamal!"
"Well, what do you expect me to think?" Jamal leaped to his feet. "That is how it was, wasn't it? That's what everyone was saying!"
"No one was saying anything! The topic never came up."
"But that's what they were thinking!"
"Maybe when you first transferred onto the Hood, Jamal," Gauri admitted. "But you know, I don't even know if that is the reason Martinez was always so thorny with you. It might have just been bad personal chemistry. It sometimes happens, you know."
"But if he and the science officer before me had good personal chemistry, the kind that boils over between the sheets—"
"Jamal." Gauri set her drink down with a sharp click. "Does it matter now?"
Banks shut his mouth, and glared moodily about the room.
"You're being transferred. You'll be on a new ship. How did the transfer happen?" she asked.
"You mean, why did Martinez change his mind now?"
"Martinez?" Gauri asked.
"He's the reason I couldn't get transferred before. He always turned down my requests before!"
Gauri thought she felt a headache coming on. Wearily, she heard herself say, "Then I guess Joaquin couldn't have actually hated you."
"He just always told me there was no reason for me to transfer! That I didn't have a good reason!"
"Maybe he never realized how he was treating you."
Gauri fell onto the edge of her settee when Banks didn't answer, and pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. Sometimes—and she hated it when she had it—she thought that Captain Martinez had reason to give Jamal the edge of his temper. Much as she liked him, she knew as well as anyone that Jamal could make liking him very hard.
"No captain likes it when an officer requests a transfer," she said quietly. "They think it reflects on them."
Banks shot her a moody glance, and she could read the thought behind it. It does reflect on him.
"So what did he say this time? When you asked for the transfer, and when he said he would grant it?"
"I didn't ask for it. He just gave it to me," Banks said. "The Potemkin's science officer is taking leave—a family emergency—and Martinez and their captain fixed it up between them that I'd take his place. We're all in the same neighborhood currently, we'll rendezvous and I'll make the transfer then."
He smiled bitterly. "That's how Martinez manages to get rid of me, without it looking like it's his fault I left. Even makes himself look like the good guy."
Gauri ignored him, and only asked, "So what happens when the Potemkin's science officer comes back?"
"Apparently, no one thinks he will. It's that kind of emergency."
"And what do we do in the meantime? Without you?" What am I supposed to do without you? she couldn't help asking herself.
"Jacobi will step in. Probably he'll get the official appointment right afterward."
"Well, whatever happens, and however it came to happen, congratulations." Gauri lifted her glass in a toast. It felt very heavy. "This chapter is over, a new chapter begins. And when it does, what happened on the Hood won't matter any more."
She said it, thinking of Jamal and his troubles with the captain. Not until it was out and hanging in the air, stinking it up with other insinuations, did she realize what it sounded like she'd said. Inwardly, she flinched hard.
Jamal also seemed to freeze. His eyes were bent to the floor, and Gauri had time to start blushing with anguish at the awkwardness that welled up between them.
Then Jamal raised his face to smile wanly at her.
"But some of it will matter," he said. "Some of what happened here will matter a lot."
Gauri felt her heart flutter.
"I'm sorry I got excited, Gauri. It's been maddening. But you're right, it doesn't matter now. What matters now is—"
He held her gaze, and she held his. An urgent Don't, Don't warred with an equally urgent Do, Do, in Gauri's breast.
So she accepted it stiffly at first, but then wilted into his arms in a way that was less relaxation and more like a catastrophic structural failure, as Jamal lifted her to her feet, put his arms around her, put his face to hers.
* * * * *
To continue investigating the room: "Disposing of Lucy"    indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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