Truth and Beauty 9-7

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Jack watched Stephen walk off, then shifted his gaze to Candy’s drink. After a while he became aware of a presence beside him and he looked up. “Olson,” he said, brightening and sitting up. “How are you?”

“Don’t give me that ‘how are you’ bullcrap,” said Olson, not bothering to keep his voice down. “You stole my girl. I saw you. You grabbed her hand and pulled her out of here with your heads down low.”

“Oh, please,” said Jack, his face hardening. “She isn’t your girl any more than she’s mine. She’s a whore.”

Olson said nothing. After a moment he spun and stalked off.

Jack watched Olson leave. Once the fat lieutenant had disappeared into the crowd, he shifted his gaze back to Candy’s martini. “Whore,” he said again, grabbing it and dashing its contents out onto the floor.


* * *
The next two days passed uneventfully. Stephen participated in a knee reconstruction and a colostomy reversal, and in the evenings met his fellow officers in the lounge. Jack busied himself with plans for the revised fuel rail, skipping some meals and ordering others to his room. Evenings he also spent in his room, so it was there the message that the dry dock had finished with the Roth reached him. “Ha,” he said. He looked at the clock in the top corner of the screen and did some mental arithmetic. The dockyard had only taken eleven and a half hours more than they had said they would, which had to be something of a record.

Depressurizing the dry dock would take place over night, and barring the unforeseen, Roth would be ready to receive her crew at four bells in the forenoon watch. Jack remotely logged into her computer, looked over her systems to the extent possible on the remote viewer, and raised the blue peter with a departure time of two bells in the afternoon watch.

“Ha!” he said again. He closed his computer and pushed it away, revealing Candy’s card on the table.

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