[b]Dockside on Paradise[/b]

“Lieutenant Cykali, report to the bridge at once,” The PA crackled with Captain Keene’s voice. Even through the distortion of the aging ships address system it sounded peevish and irritated. Mave sighed and looked down at the work the corpsman was completing. The bullet wound was still red and puckered against he tan flesh, oddly reminiscent of the way a windshield starred when struck with a round. The pirate had been lucky to wing her when she and her detachment had burst into their lair, but he had been good too, she was glad that one of the crewmen following her had unloaded his shotgun into the fellow. As far as she was concerned there was no place in the universe for enemies who combined skill with good fortune.

“No rest for the wicked hey LT?” the corpsman said with a resigned chuckle. He had the liquid accent of a Tau Cettian though his service file claimed he was from Handle’s World. Many spacers had such inconsistencies in their personnel files. The were an itinerant lot and star travel was dangerous and unpleasant enough that no one asked two many questions when it came to skilled bodies. During the height of the recent war with the Terran Hegemony the fleet had taken to conscripting sailors left and right and anyone with an ident chip and all his limbs had been good enough for the recruiting boards. Most of those sailors had been paid of with the Peace and had found service in the merchant fleets when the warships they had crewed were mothballed or sold out of service. Those that remained were career men and women who had found something about the service that compesnated them in a way the higher wages of merchant service did not. In the case of Doc Pavara, it was that he was good at his job, and he liked being with other people who where good at theirs.  

“Thanks doc,” Mave replied and hopped down of the table that folded down from the integral medical computer. Technician III Raj Pavara, allegedly from Handle’s World, wasn’t a doctor in any sense the civilized galaxy would acknowledge but he had nursed more wounded crew members back to health than Mave cared to think about it. A fleet medical technician rating wasn’t the same as being a physician but it was better than most people had out here on the edge of settled space and he probably had more actual medical knowledge than most of the charlatans an amateurs that called themselves doctors here abouts.

“It goes without saying that you should try to stay off that!” Pavara called as Mave strode out of the med bay and into the C-deck corridor.

“Yeah yeah, subject to the needs of the service etcetera,” she called back over her shoulder, doing her best to ignore the jolts of discomfort that radiated through her hip with each step. She was a trim woman in her mid twenties, of average height but with the lean whipcord muscles that years of the brutal work of interstellar travel. Her dark red brown hair was cut short to Fleet standard and her green eyes were bright and alert. The ship was almost deserted, most of the crew were on liberty at the moment, spending their pay in a orgy of drunken debauchery at the taverns and brothels of Dockside, the seedy village that had grown up around the harbor at Paradise. While starships could land anywhere, water was preferred as it soaked up the thrust of landing motors continual lift off and landing would eventually destroy even a concrete surface, and without constant refinishing they soon became pitted to use. Water was also the primary source of reaction mass feeding the ships fusion bottles as well as a safe working fluid for most of the hydraulic systems.

Those crewmen she did encounter were dressed as she was, in the grey mottled battledress of the Fleet, though the garment was military they were for the most part stained with lubricant and chemicals, marking them as members of a working ship rather than some rear echelon parade unit. Most of the glances were friendly, some were sympathetic, though a few were guardedly hostile. Captain Keene had his favorites among the crew, and while they never rose to the level of outright insubordination, they made their opinion of her known. A starship was a small community, and officers couldn’t afford to maintain distance from their spacers, the situation made it hard to maintain discipline under the best of circumstances, and an officer like Keene made the task almost impossible.

Suppressing a sigh, Mave climbed the aft companionway heading up to A deck and the bridge. The winding stairway jolted at her wound but she gritted her teeth and kept climbing. On commercial ships elevators were sometimes used, but on hard charging warships, the risk of a elevator tube torquing and trapping people inside were unacceptably high.  By the time she reached the top her side was throbbing with pain, though somehow she doubted Captain Keene was in a mood to give her more time off in the infirmary. Time to face the music.