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“Well,” said the grey-haired woman. “This beats the band. I am Ms Bergman, the IT technician.”
“How do you do,” said Stephen, raising his wine glass and bowing as well as he could while seated. Ms Bergman returned the compliment and they both drank.
This left the woman on the purser’s right as the only remaining unknown at the table. “I am Miss Lund,” said she. “Ms Lund. I am the Electrician.”
Stephen bowed to and drank with Ms Lund as well. He had now drunk several glasses of wine on an empty stomach, but the soup tureen had not completed its circuit of the table. He urged it onward with a steady gaze and a clenching of his jaw and abdominal muscles, even bending the rule of manners by picking up his spoon as the carpenter received the bowl.
In the great cabin, Bollwerk brought in a fresh pot of coffee, retreating with the empty one and leaving the captain alone. Jack topped off his mug (it seemed rude not to, even if Bollwerk didn’t see) and retreated to his desk. He pulled up the most-recent of Roth’s logs from before he had take over command, to see how the Roths typically spent their days.
He tapped quickly through the logs from Jevons’s time; Jevons had had command for less than a month and had spent all of that time in port in a home system. Aside from a brief note that the previous surgeon, a man named Lakey, had been discharged dead, nothing of note had occurred during that time.
Prior to Jevons the enteries had been equally brief: course made good, arrivals and departures, crew employed ATSR - as the service required, cargo taken on and discharged. Roth’s jobs befitted her rols as a transport: oxygen to Earth, desalination machinery to Creighton II, construction equipment and steel beams to Halsey interlocking. Early the previous year she had visited the yard at Mars for unspecified work to the number three thruster. Few records indicated any crew discipline; either the Roths were a quiet bunch or their captain had been one of the many who punished off the books. Of course, as a transport, the Roth would not have had any prizes for her crew to celebrate, nor any prize money for them to celebrate with.
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