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Mister Veidt, the gunner, was another jolly man, though lately he seemed preoccupied. He had no great fund of things to say and seemed to know it, but unlike others with nothing to say, who inflicted that nothing upon everyone else with endless streams of prattle, the gunner stayed silent. He was not taciturn; he laughed easily, but had little in the way of opinions of observations to offer. It was more than possible to spend a pleasant Sunday afternoon sharing the wardroom with him, and Stephen had done so twice, catching up on his medical journals while the gunner occupied himself with his own tablet, trading no more than the occasional “coffee, sir?” “yes, thank you,” when one or the other of them rose to refill his mug in the prep room.
Also quiet was Ms Lund, the electrician, though in her case it seemed more a case of shyness than lack of imagination. She was not from the Middle East, as Stephen had at first supposed, but from somewhere in the Carribean, more specifically she did not say. When not actively at work she generally studied to pass an exam whose name was an acronym of some sort, the passing of which would qualify her to serve on a larger vessel. At other times she was a talented chess player, easily the best Stephen had played against in many years. Stephen had learned with surprise that she was close to 30 years old - he had thought her to be in her early 20s - but on reflection he realized that melanin was protective against sun exposure, so he should not have been surprised.
Ms Bergman, the other woman in the ward room, looked at first glance, to be older than she was, being grey-haired but only 28. She never seemed to have to study her trade; she knew the syntax and nuances of every programming language yet developed as if they each were her primary language. On most evenings she painted in the officer’s recreation suite or exercised in what passed for their gym, but occasionally she joined Sergeant Strasser in his bouts of drinking, matching him glass for glass, to his amusement and frustration, spinning increasingly tall tales (‘let me tell you about the space whales - we got rammed by one off Sirius-II’) and making increasingly scabrous remarks (‘they call it Orion’s sword but it’s really his dick’). Two or three nights ago she had launched into a lecture on Roth’s true name, which she claimed to be Wrath. “Look at the raised letters on the counter. They’re off-center ‘cause the W’s missing. And the O, what they’ve painted as if it’s a broken O, is really a broken O, I mean A.” On regaining sobriety the following morning, she never remembered any of the claims she’d made while inebriated.
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