To have something to pretend to be doing, Claire checked her own messages. The console still wasn’t set up with a bank account number to send anything, but she could get them. Aunt Jezzy was asking for some more money this month to buy a bassinet or something for the newest grandniece. Somehow Aunt Jezzy had kept from Noah that Claire had a raise with her promotion, but in return Aunt Jezzy wanted access to take the extra money from time to time. Noah had spent what Aunt Jezzy had budgeted for the new child on a hover bike, so the family needed a bit more from Claire this month.

  Aunt Jezzy advised Claire to see if it were true that Harrington Steading had a bank that allowed deposits in a woman’s name alone. Denying Noah access to accounts to which he was the legal owner was fraud, of course, but it didn’t feel like that since the accounts only existed at all because Claire was being paid for service in the GSN. Planet-wide Grayson law laid down by Protector Benjamin did allow female property ownership, but Burdette Steading law still made a woman’s debts or property the responsibility of her protector. The not-quite-contradicting laws combined in ways Claire was pretty sure the Protector had never intended, and Noah jointly owned her accounts. Worse, her cousin had learned that he could debit the family bank accounts directly once he found them. Apparently Noah’s latest surrogate father figure, a church deacon, had had something to do with teaching him that.

  Claire blew her nose. She wished she were on the Ephraim.

  Someone knocked on the door, and Rustin looked up, pausing her message to her sister.

  Claire looked at the door, forgetting that would show her face to Rustin. Claire scrubbed her eyes quickly and started to stand, but Rustin waved her off toward their stateroom sink and answered the door herself.

  She opened it only partway, though, blocking it with her body. Claire couldn’t see past her, but she knew it was Lieutenant Loyd on the other side. She could clearly hear him talking to Rustin.

  Claire washed her face quickly, even though the sound of the water would give away to Loyd that she was hiding behind her roommate.

  Rustin tried to claim that Claire was unavailable without telling Lieutenant Loyd that Claire had been bawling.

  Lieutenant Loyd wasn’t having any of it.

  He just overrode Rustin. Claire hadn’t really expected her to be able to stop anyone, but it was sweet of her to try. That was Rustin, perpetually sweet, but not entirely effective. Claire was surprised he didn’t simply force the door open or come in. Maybe he thought she was naked.

  Instead, Lieutenant Loyd just ordered through the door, “Claire, meet me in CIC in five.”

  Rustin tried one more time to talk him out of it somehow, but Claire swallowed and answered herself with an “Aye, Sir.” It sounded weepy, but she couldn’t really help that.

  Lieutenant Loyd must have left, because Rustin slipped right back in, shut the door firmly, and then turned into a dervish of motion. She straightened Claire’s uniform, brushed off lint, and finally slapped a little plastic tube of eye drops into Claire’s hands. The crystal liquid miraculously cleared the redness in a moment. Without that to draw attention, the puffiness seemed hardly noticeable.

  Rustin gave Claire a quick hug and shoed her out the door to meet whatever new nastiness was about to enter her day. Senior officers never sought out ensigns in their staterooms for anything pleasant. Claire thought of her last watch qualification sign off with Lieutenant Commander Lockhart and shuddered.

  * * *

  Claire made her way down to CIC and belatedly realized that she’d forgotten her comp pad. Patting her front pocket, she found that Rustin had stuck it in there along with a stylus. The pointy bit of plastic to make notes on a computer screen had a designer brand name, making it one of Rustin’s. Claire carefully fitted the stylus back in her pocket to keep from losing it, still walking fast. She slammed into Lieutenant Commander Lockhart just outside of CIC.

  The impact was cushioned by Lockhart swaying a step back with her as if he had been just standing there waiting for her to step into him. He leaned in as Claire tried to step back. Chuckling, Lockhart held Claire in a bear hug, reached around, and grabbed her bottom and pinched.

  Claire slammed her fist into his solar plexus.

  Lockhart stumbled back, swearing at her, and promised to clear all the tactics sign-offs he’d given her.

  Claire bit her lip and just backed away. If he decided to tell Commander Greentree, she wasn’t sure what would happen, but it wouldn’t be good.

  Lockhart let a smile creep back on to his face and told her to come to his stateroom when she was ready to apologize. Then he turned smartly and marched away down the passageway humming a ditty popular in strip clubs that made Claire’s ears burn.

  Lieutenant Loyd stood inside the open hatch to CIC, white-lipped. Claire cringed, her stomach sinking as she wondered what he had decided to see. He blew out a long breath of air. “We need to go see the captain about that.”

  Claire felt nauseous. “I’m not going to do you either. No matter what you’re going to tell the captain. I won’t.”

  The lieutenant flushed with fury just as Claire had expected him to, but he didn’t make any farther threats.

  Claire backed against the bulkhead nervously searching for a protective audience. Claire didn’t think Lieutenant Loyd would get grabby. He hadn’t done anything like that yet. She backed a few steps just to be sure and tripped over an ankle-height junction box.

  Lieutenant Loyd caught a flailing arm and pulled her upright, but then dropped her arm like it was arc welder-hot. He stepped away with his hands palm up.

  “Ensign, that is so fucked up that I don’t know where to start. This was supposed to be a counseling session where I told you that if you wanted this ‘good job’ you needed to start doing it instead of playing GSN dress-up.” He narrowed his eyes. “Obviously, I have no idea what’s going on with my own officers. So, we’re going to fix that.”

  Claire crossed her arms and hugged herself, hunching her shoulders over. It hid her breasts a little, but not really enough. Claire tensed, waiting to find out what her outburst was going to do to her this time.

  The lieutenant ducked back into CIC and with a quick word sent some petty officers scurrying down the passageway.

  Claire hovered half in and half out, wanting to be around more people but reluctant to leave him before learning what he intended to do to her.

  Master Chief Wallens took the corner at a quick lope and then slowed to wander into CIC as if he just happening to be strolling by.

  Claire followed him in, and Lieutenant Loyd directed her to take a chair.

  The master chief sat down next to Claire with a bit of space between the chairs but angled towards Lieutenant Loyd and flipped out his own comp and appeared to completely absorb himself in some kind of paperwork.

  Lieutenant Loyd sat, scrubbed his forehead with his hands, and still rubbing his temples, started talking. “Okay, Ensign Lecroix, the sum total of this counseling session was supposed to be you standing at attention while I yelled at you about not doing the tactics sim sessions that I told you to do. And that the captain told you to do back when you got your promotion. You were supposed to leave here chastised, having promised to stop lazing around, and go spend the next four hours blowing up ships. And then you were supposed to spend half your days for the next couple weeks blowing things up, too, and by that time you’d probably manage to make the ship that gets blown up be something besides your own ship at least some of the time. But that happened.” Lieutenant Loyd flipped a hand towards the passageway and flared his fingers. “Why didn’t you just kick him in the balls?”

  The master chief’s sudden stillness revealed he was listening after all.

  Claire bit her lip.

  “This is the part where you say something, Ensign.” Lieutenant Loyd chided quietly.

  Claire hunched farther in her chair. She was sure her expression was mulish, but she’d never been good at controlling it when she felt like she was being attacked. “No excuse, Sir.” She attempted the standard answer.

  Lieutenant Loyd’s response of “Fucking Academy” was not what she expected. He resumed rubbing his temples and sighed.

  Claire glared at him and waited for him to try to drag another answer out of her. You couldn’t win when something like this happened, but you could hold onto your pride and not lose.

  Lieutenant Loyd looked back, occasionally blinking or glancing around enough to keep it from being a staring contest, but he didn’t break the silence.

  “You can’t kick them.” Claire whispered.

  Lieutenant Loyd made an inquisitive noise but matched her volume.

  “Look, it’s—” Claire coughed and tried to return to a normal tone and keep the quaver out of her voice. “When someone does something like that,” she looked at Master Chief Wallens warily as she continued waiting for him to exclaim or interrupt or demand details or proof or something. The master chief didn’t show any response at all, so Claire continued, “When, that is, if it was some stranger I suppose it might work, but you’d have to kick pretty hard and not miss, and it’s not the kind of thing you can practice. But strangers don’t really do that. It’s people you know who you have to see day after day. A punch they might laugh off and get over without feeling the need to make it into some kind of power thing. Because, well, if it becomes a power thing that’s when it really gets bad.” Claire clamped down before she spilled too much more. Those were Aunt Jezzy’s secrets to tell anyway, not hers. She’d just been taught from it, was all.

  Lieutenant Loyd shook his head. “Ensign Lecroix, we really need to work on your tactics.”

  Claire planted her elbows on the table in front of her and folded her hands. “No.”

  Lieutenant Loyd snorted and arched his eyebrows at her. “I wouldn’t let you pull that shit normally. You should know that, but I’d like to think that this hasn’t been a normal day for you. Would you say that was true?”

  Claire swallowed unsure of what to do since he hadn’t blown up at her defiance. The master chief feigned total absorption in his screen again. Turning back to Lieutenant Loyd, Claire said, “I apologize for what I said in the passageway.”

  Lieutenant Loyd just raised his eyebrows and waited.

  Claire just looked at him in confusion and then flushing added, “Sir.”

  “Apology accepted,” he answered immediately. “And I still want you to work on tactics.”

  Claire shook her head, “LT, I guess you mean well, but what’s the point?”

  “Oh, I don’t know: the continuation of politics by other means, fighting and winning our star nation’s wars, or maybe just because it happens to be your job and doing your job to the best of your ability is the right thing to do?”

  Claire hunched again, swallowed, and closed her eyes. “When Lockhart reports me to Commander Greentree, and he’s gonna, I’ll be out. Maybe just off the ship, or maybe out of the whole GSN.”

  She shivered. “There’s no reason to do this tactics stuff, and look, Sir, there never was. The best I could do was last long enough to get some solid engineering experience to transfer to civie jobs. Tactics doesn’t do that.”

  “Wow, Saganami Island really failed you.” Lieutenant Loyd breathed.

  He straightened and went on. “Now here’s some free officer continuing education for you. There’re two kinds of counseling, right?”

  Claire jerked a nod, stiffening to attention in her chair, “Yes, Sir.”

  “So right now we’ve got informal counseling right here while I try to find a way to get through your thick steader skull that I like you and want you to be a good officer, and even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter because the captain has decided that you are going to be turned into a good officer. You may have noticed, he’s a Greentree. There’s a fair number of them in the service. They’re generally pretty hardcore, and he’s hardcore even for a Greentree.

  “Maybe you noticed the maroon trousers? Yep. He got himself into the Protector’s Own because he wanted to study warfare under the likes of Alfredo Yu, Harriet Benson-Dessouix, and, oh yeah, Honor Alexander-Harrington. And they took him. Which says even more, because the Protector’s Own only takes the very best.

  “Anyway, onward to the next kind: formal counseling. That’s what you use for the hard cases that you need to build a record for in case you need to kick them entirely out of the service. Its generally bad practice to discuss the flaws of senior officers with subordinates, but I’m junior to him too. So we’ll call this part a bitch session of the JOPA, okay?”

  Claire glanced over at Master Chief Wallens. He was still pretending to do routine paperwork, or maybe he was really doing paperwork and got called in to play chaperone for sketchy informal counseling sessions all the time. “Um, that’s the Junior Officer Protection Association, Sir?”

  “Exactly. Generally a load of bunk that gets claimed when somebody did something idiotic and wants to use peer pressure to keep from having his ass properly handed to him. But from time to time, captains get crazy. It has its uses. Like now.

  “So let’s just say that I happen to know that there’s already a file on Mr. Lockhart and that the XO has been looking for a final nail for that coffin. I just gave it to him. Or rather you did, and I reported it. I used to feel sorry for him since his marriage on Manticore fell apart, and he seemed to think that Grayson girls would be nearly a different species from the Mantie women he tried dating. I thought he was grieving, not hunting. If we’re entirely unlucky, he’ll be on-board for another couple weeks. But it’s more likely we’ll pull into the next available station and dump him.”

  Claire felt a wave of relief . . . mingled with shock that she wasn’t being punished for standing up for herself.

  * * *

  By Lieutenant Loyd’s metric, the Manasseh was entirely lucky. The XO stopped by Claire’s stateroom later that evening, after she’d spent a long session in the simulator being repeatedly killed by various adversaries. The lieutenant had replayed each session in detail pointing out why she had died.

  The XO had a similar recording as evidence against Lockhart. Lieutenant Loyd had been working a tactical session of his own and recording it while waiting for her to arrive, and it included some visual through the open door and all of the audio of her encounter with the Mantie exchange officer. The XO blushed and couldn’t meet Claire’s eyes when the fast-forwarded display showed the Mantie grinning at her impact and caught the pinch in clear detail. The XO just needed her thumbprint and signature that she was the person shown. Then he provided the contact information for Legal Assistance if Claire wanted to press assault charges.

  Rustin was in the back of the stateroom engrossed in studying the approach for docking at the station. So Claire didn’t hesitate to ask, “Sir, I hit a senior officer. Why aren’t I the one being charged?”

  The exec just shook his head. “I didn’t hear that. What did you say?”

  Claire said it again, and the exec again denied hearing her.

  She started to repeat herself a third time and then stopped. Finally, she said, “What else is on the tape?”

  The exec pushed a button and the rest played through. Lieutenant Loyd rose quickly and blocked the view before Lieutenant Commander Lockhart’s muffled grunt and then very clearly audible solicitation. The exec shrugged. “He could try to file charges under the Articles of War, but no Grayson admiral would hear them, and no one else has jurisdiction. The commanding officer could make an issue of it, but he feels that you need all the time you can get in the tactical simulators and should not be distracted by petty charges any reasonable Admiralty Review Board would throw out.”

  Claire blinked. “You have a witness . . .” She trailed off, realizing Lieutenant Loyd had either left that out of his report or colluded with the exec.

  The exec snorted as he walked away. He called over his shoulder, “Merchant-class Advanced Technician is a hack exam that you could have passed after your first year at Saganami. I’ll approve your leave chits to go waste time prepping for a civilian career when you get competent in the tactics sims and stop signing yourself up for scams.” Then she remembered the certification course she had been trying to take leave to attend. It wasn’t a scam! Unless . . . she tried to remember if any of the glossy advertising had actually mentioned who gave the certification or accredited the training program. The whole thing seemed less important now.

  Claire mulled over whether she could just have said something weeks earlier instead of ducking Lockhart’s advances. More than the master chief on this ship seemed trustworthy.

  She spent another afternoon and morning running sims while Manasseh prepared to dock at the poorly outfitted station orbiting Masada. A few days had passed since she’d had a chance to review maintenance logs or run spot checks. If being an officer meant ‘fighting the ship’ as Lieutenant Loyd and the exec insisted, she had to depend on other officers to remember to schedule their maintenance smartly and ensure the crew had the time, tools, and training to keep the Manasseh from dissolving in hyper from radiation corrosions. The materials were pretty fantastic, so actual structural integrity would likely never be an issue on a modern warship, she reflected wryly.

  Rustin took the bridge watch for the docking. Claire paused her sim when the ship got close to watch on the screen in CIC where Rustin’s boss, Lieutenant Knutson, had duty and would be watching to keep an eye on his division officer. She was distracted from the initial calls to the station by the duty officer’s selection and practice targeting of the station and the other ships in orbit. The whole ship drilled on killing things out of sheer habit. Captain Ayres would have strenuously objected to his crew running targeting solutions on allies, especially since one of the Mantie cruisers would be taking charge of Lieutenant Commander Lockhart and saving Manasseh an extra trip to Manticore, but Commander Greentree obviously felt differently.