The message buzzer hummed softly in the quiet of my cabin. I turned a dial on my desktop. "Ramos here."

The face of Lieutenant Harque, the captain's aide, sprang to life on the screen. Harque had an easy smile and curly good looks, a boy-next-door handsomeness that let him win over people without having a speck of true charm in his self-important body. "The captain would like to see you, Explorer."

"Yes?"

"In the conference room. As soon as possible."

"Does she want me to bring Yarrun?"

"I've already contacted Yarrun. Harque out." The picture went blank.

Typical. I had come to expect that sort of thing from Harque. If I confronted him about it, he would claim he was saving me trouble by calling my subordinate for me. I slid back my chair and sighed as I headed for the door.

The light over my desk turned off behind me. It did that automatically. The quick return to darkness always made me think the lamp was eager to see me go.

My Subordinate

Yarrun was waiting for me outside the door. His eyes were bleary — he must have been asleep when Harque buzzed him. Yarrun preferred an early bedtime. To compensate, he got up hours before anyone else was awake. He said he enjoyed the quiet of the ship in the early morning.

I don't know what he did with the time he had to himself. Perhaps he just tended his own collection — he collected dyed silk.

Explorer Second Class Yarrun Derigha was officially my subordinate because he graduated from the Academy three years after I did. Unofficially, we were equal partners. We worked as a team, the only two Expendable Crew Members among eighty-seven Vacuum crew members too valuable to be wasted.

Yarrun was missing the left side of his face. To be precise, the left half of his jaw never formed and the right hadn't grown since he was six. The result looked like half a head, with the skin stretched taut from his left cheekbone to his partial right jaw.

There was nothing else wrong with Yarrun. His brain was intact. His Intelligence Profile ranked higher than ninety-nine percent of the population. He had some trouble eating solids, but the Admiralty graciously accommodated that — the cafeteria stocked a large supply of nutritious fluids.

When he talked, his enunciation was unfailingly precise. Since it cost him a great deal of effort, he preferred not to speak if he could help it.

I had known Yarrun six years, first in the Academy, then on the ship. We had saved each other's lives so often we no longer kept count. We could talk to each other about anything, and we could be quiet together without feeling uncomfortable. I was as close to Yarrun as I have ever wanted to be with anyone.

And yet.

There were still times when the sight of his face made my skin crawl.

In the Halls (Part 1)

The halls were deserted at that hour. The ship only needed a twenty-person running crew at night, and the on-duty crew members usually stayed close to their posts. I loved to walk the empty corridors when the lights had been dimmed and every door was closed. Neither Yarrun nor I spoke. The soft clopping of our footsteps echoed lightly in the stillness of the sleeping ship.

Our ship was called the Jacaranda, named after a family of flowering trees native to Old Earth. The previous captain had actually owned a jacaranda tree and kept it in his quarters. When it was in bloom, he would pin a blossom to his lapel every morning. The deep blue of the flower went well with khaki.

When our current captain took command, she said, "Get that damned thing out of my room. It's shedding." The tree was moved to the cafeteria, where it got in everyone's way and frequently dropped petals onto plates of food.

A few months later, the tree suddenly died. Someone probably poisoned it. The crew held a party to celebrate the tree being reduced to proto-nute, and even I attended. It was the first time I tasted Divian champagne.

Now the only jacarandas on ship were stylized ones stenciled on walls and doors. The colors of these trees indicated the authorization needed to enter a given area. I was allowed into areas marked with red jacarandas and black. I was not permitted to enter rooms marked with orange, blue, green, yellow, purple, pink, or brown.

Red areas were public ones like the cafeteria. Black areas were reserved for Explorers and their equipment. The Admiralty denied that black had any special significance.

Our Captain

The jacaranda on the door of the conference room was red. The door opened as it heard our footsteps approach. Yarrun let me enter first — in public, we made a point of observing rank protocol.

Captain Prope stood at the room's Star Window, apparently lost in thought. She stared out on the star-filled blackness like the captain of a clipper ship inhaling sea air from the foredeck: spine straight as iron, hands on hips, head tilted back slightly so her chestnut-red hair hung free of her shoulders. If she had been facing us, we would have likely seen her nostrils flared to the wind.

No doubt she had assumed this heroic pose several minutes ago, and had been waiting impatiently for us to walk in. For some reason, she desperately wanted to impress us.

The door closed behind us with a hiss. Prope took this as her cue to turn and notice us. "Oh, come in, sit down, yes." She laughed lightly, a frothy little laugh guaranteed by Outward Fleet Psych-techs to make subordinates feel like equals. Prope was an ardent student of the Mechanics of Charisma.

"Sorry," she said. "My mind was somewhere else." She turned back for one more wistful peek at the night. "I can never get over how beautiful the stars are."

I did not point out that the view was a color-enhanced computer simulation. A real window would have jeopardized the integrity of the ship's hull.

The News

We sat in our usual chairs (me on the captain's right, Yarrun on her left), and rolled up to the conference table.

"Would either of you like coffee?" the captain asked. We shook our heads in unison. "You're sure? Some fruit juice maybe? No? Well, I hope you don't mind if I have a little something. I always enjoy a midnight snack."

She smiled in our general direction, but her eyes were too low to meet ours. Like most people, she could not look at our faces for any length of time. She talked to our chests or our hair or our ears… never to our faces, except for a quick glance now and then to confirm her squeamishness.

For some reason, she thought Yarrun and I didn't notice.

We watched as she poured herself coffee. In public, she drank it black. When she thought no one was watching, she used double loads of cream and sugar.

For a few moments, she stirred her coffee, even though there was nothing in it. I couldn't tell if this was reflex or affectation. Finally she said, "I suppose you're wondering what this is all about."

She paused, so we nodded.

"Twenty minutes ago," Prope continued, "I received a coded message from the Golden Cedar. You know the ship?"

"Admiral Chee's flagship," I replied. Everyone in the Fleet knew the ship. Half the children in the Technocracy had heard of it. Learning the names of the admirals and their flagships was a Common Curriculum memory exercise for seven-year-olds.

"In three hours, the Golden Cedar will pass within ten thousand kilometers of us." Prope was watching us out of the corner of her eye, so I knew she was about to drop a surprise in our laps. "At that time, Admiral Chee will secretly transfer aboard the Jacaranda. Very secretly — we three and Harque will be the only ones to know he's here. You two will see to the admiral's comfort." She looked at us with narrowed eyes, as if she doubted we could handle the job. "Any problems?"