Alysha had had very little sleep when she reported for duty in the morning; finding one obscure and little used door in a ship the size of a battlecruiser, even with the help of the schematics, had proven more of a challenge than she’d anticipated. She hadn’t been precisely grateful for the inadvertent lesson on how schematics only told you that corridors should be passable, not that they were blocked off for repairs, or clogged with extra supplies that had not yet been shoved into storage compartments... but it had been, she thought, a useful thing to learn. If nothing else, she now knew several routes to and from that part of the ship. Even having been up too late, though, she’d forced herself to go through her reading before dropping unconscious, and she was very, very glad to have done so when Felix started quizzing all of them on it. Since no one else had studied the material, she was the only one saved from Felix’s dry commentary.
“How did you know?” the ensign whispered to her, pained.
“I guessed.” Alysha paused, then offered with a lopsided smile, “It’s always best to err on the side of more work rather than less.”
The felid groaned, muffling it beneath a hand. “Some of us have to sleep!”
“Sleep,” Felix said, overhearing him on his return from the head, “is for civilians, Ensign. Fleet officers are made of sterner stuff. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right answer. You’re learning. Maybe if more of you were model citizens like Lieutenant Forrest here, we might get more done around here.”
That, she thought with a grimace, was a test. No doubt her assignment to the water environment had inspired some whispers about being a senior’s pet; Felix was trying to exacerbate that tension, see how everyone handled it. She didn’t enjoy the feeling that he was painting a target on her back. The idea was to encourage solidarity, wasn’t it? Was Felix testing for flaws so they could be identified before they broke under real pressure?
Once upon a time, a friend had told Alysha that she already thought like an admiral. Ruefully, Alysha wished that was true... because it would imply she already knew the answers to questions like the ones posed by Felix’s behavior.
Nor did her day improve when she logged into the water environment, for Sar had nothing new to report, and though Alysha saw Wyn in passing the engineer’s only response to her was a curt greeting truncated by his body as he swam past. Sar had been sympathetic and taken her to see some of the other Naysha as a distraction, and while Alysha had spent the hour pleasantly it frustrated her that the repair work wasn’t going better for her people.

* * *
This pattern held for the remainder of the week. The glitch in the alarm system resisted both diagnosis and repair, and neither of the Naysha engineers had any useful progress to report, when in fact she saw them at all. Felix continued to drive the auxiliary bridge watch hard, and while her fellows didn’t resent her for what could have been construed as his preferential treatment, she didn’t think they liked her much either. Or maybe there were other factors, which was possible; she was the only lieutenant there during the morning shift, and the crop of ensigns working alongside her were probably not going to feel comfortable getting too familiar. She could hope, anyway.
The beginning of the new week brought her the first of her recurring meetings with the NOTC, Commander Lovelace. There was definitely a type for the majority of the humans borrowed into Fleet, and like Mark West, Alysha’s physical education instructor at the Academe, Lovelace fit it. Most of the time, Alysha liked the no-nonsense practicality and straight talk. Right now, with her discomfort over the situation with Beringwaite, she could have wished that Lovelace wouldn’t give her that look that seemed to see straight through her.
“So, Forrest,” Lovelace said, thumbing through the reports on her data tablet. “Looks like you’re keeping busy, if these updates are any indication.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lovelace glanced at her over the edge of the tablet. “Workload giving you any trouble?”
“No, sir,” Alysha said. When the skeptical look persisted, she finished, “I’m adjusting.”
“Mmm. You’d probably be able to squeeze in some extra sleep if you weren’t going into the water environment so often.”
“Logging into the water environment daily is part of the duties of the liaison position, sir.”
“For an hour,” Lovelace said, conversationally. “It looks like you spend longer than that.”
“Some days,” Alysha replied. “When the job seems to require the extra time.”
“Overachieving, are we, Forrest?”
Ruefully, Alysha murmured, “Sleep is for civilians, sir.”
That surprised a laugh out of Lovelace. “Let me guess. Felix.” When Alysha didn’t reply, the human grinned. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I won’t hold your telling silence against you there.” She set the tablet aside. “I see Jae’en’s dragged you into the skullbashes.”
“He’s very good at them.” When Lovelace cocked her head, Alysha picked her words carefully, unsure whether this was the sort of conversation she should be having with the training officer. “At managing personalities and organizing ways for them to communicate.”
“That’s an interesting observation.” Lovelace folded her arms, leaning back. “Did you get that from one week? You can’t have seen him more than two or three times.”
“It’s only a first impression,” Alysha demurred. But couldn’t help finishing, “But I trust it.”
“How would you take it apart?”
Alysha looked up. “Sir?”
“That first impression,” Lovelace said, watching her. “How would you articulate it?”
A test? No, she thought. Maybe this was part of training. Evaluating her peers would be part of her work as an officer for the rest of her career, after all. And maybe it would help her navigate her confused impressions of Beringwaite. “He sought me out once I was assigned. The first day. To invite me to an unofficial team meeting. He went out of his way to include me. He runs that meeting—he’d tell you he doesn’t, but he keeps everyone talking on topic once it starts. He doesn’t let anyone complain about other people, either.” She thought of the retiring Harat-Shar, Valery. “He also looks out for people who might be dismissed.” The warning Jae’en had issued her about Beringwaite she kept to herself.
“Good start,” Lovelace said. “Are you running into any problems with anyone?”
Beringwaite hadn’t actually done anything wrong, so: “No, sir.”
Lovelace nodded and made a note on the tablet. “Anything you want to ask me? Part of my job here is to give you extra work when you make the mistake of requesting it.” She grinned. “That would be additional training opportunities.”
Alysha was fairly certain she kept her ears from flattening. “I could use more time to settle in before I change my schedule.”
“Fair answer,” Lovelace said. “Go on, then, Forrest. We’ve both got work to do.”
“Yes, sir.”

* * *
This time, Alysha brought two bags of popcorn to the skullbash, neither one of them healthy. Her arrival brought forth a chorus of cheerful greetings, and she was relieved of both her offerings. “One of them is cheese and hot pepper,” she said. “The other one is… chocolate and caramel-drizzle? Or candy crunch? I don’t remember.”
“She learned her lesson but good last time,” the Harat-Shar pardine said. Timur, his name was. He was on permanent track in the Medical department.
“That spicy stuff is for me,” added Daren, snagging it out of Timur’s hand.
“Settle down, boys and girls,” Jae’en said, lifting his hands and affecting a look of great sobriety. “We know our time is limited—“
“Before we collapse of exhaustion,” muttered another Hinichi, a woman working in Science.
Jae’en ignored her regally. “But it’s time to collect our winnings.”
“Yes! I’m utterly going to wipe you all up. Hit us, Jae’en!”
“Our winnings?” Alysha asked, bemused, taking a seat.
“We started a betting pool,” Daren said.
“…on how long you would spend in the water environment this week,” Timur finished, grinning.
“You what?” Alysha asked, ears sagging.
“All right, who’s got everyone’s bets?” Valery held up a data tablet and Jae’en pointed at it. “Good. Is everyone who placed a bet here?” The Harat-Shar nodded. “Then it’s time to read the numbers. Ready?”
A chorus of ‘yeses’ came from the room, muffled in some cases by mouths full of cookies or popcorn or mugs of something. Alysha covered her face with a hand.
“And the number is… twenty-two!” Jae’en peered at her over his data tablet. “That’s it? Really, alet. We thought you joined to work hard.”
The cackles around her were interrupted by moans of distress from those who’d guessed too far off the mark.
“The winner,” Valery announced, “is me.”
“It’s always the quiet ones,” Timur said dramatically, sagging into his chair in histrionic dismay. “Take your money. Leave you crying… ow!” He laughed as another Tam-illee smacked his belly. “My acting was better than that!”
“How much did you win?” Alysha asked, bemused. “And can I bet on myself next time?”
“Nine fin,” Valery said. “And you can’t bet or you might try to game the numbers.”
“Poor Alysha,” Jae’en said. “Someone give her a cookie.”
Alysha accepted the food and drink, wondering if what she felt was chagrin or amusement. Both, maybe. She was grateful that her assignment to the water environment was being treated as extra work instead of a privilege, at least among the lieutenants on her shift. So far she was cautiously optimistic that she’d weather her assignment on the Songlance at least as well as she had the Diamondwing’s. Maybe, she thought, soaking in the congenial atmosphere of the skullbash, she’d do better.
Beringwaite, she noticed, didn’t come.
As with the first skullbash, she stayed back to help Jae’en and Valery with the clean-up, wondering if he’d have more friendly advice. She wasn’t disappointed.
“Survived your first meeting with Lovelace?”
Alysha was wiping down the table. “Surviving seems… a harsh term. It wasn’t a bad interview.”
“Did she ask you about extra training?” Valery said.
“Yes?” She glanced up, found them exchanging glances. “I guess she does that with everyone.”
“Find something to take soon,” Jae’en said, stacking the trays. “Or she’ll make suggestions.”
“Her suggestions are… grueling,” Valery murmured.
The humor of having Lovelace talk to her about Jae’en only to have Jae’en turn around and talk to her about Lovelace struck her powerfully. She hid her smile by finishing with the wiping. “Any ideas on what I should do?”
“Lecture stuff,” Valery said firmly. “Things that you can read and then take tests on.”
“He says that because he doesn’t like hands-on courses,” Jae’en said. “But if you’re tired, I wouldn’t sign up for anything that happens at a set time, like one of the seminar sessions taught by the senior officers. Those tend to be really useful, but they’re unforgiving about you missing them. The test there is as much about your ability to manage your time and energy level as it is about what you’re learning.”
Alysha paused, resting a hand on the back of one of the chairs. “How did you learn all of this?”
Jae’en splayed his ears. “I’m naturally quick?” Valery nudged him and the Aera laughed. “All right, all right. My first assignment as an ensign was to assist the training officer on a warcruiser. I have big ears. I heard a lot of the conversations he had with the senior staff.”
“A warcruiser!” Alysha exclaimed.
“Don’t make it out to be a big thing,” Jae’en said. “They have huge complements, warcruisers, and they need to fill them out somehow. I didn’t do anything special to earn the berth, and my work for the NOTC there—the senior NOTC, because he had a team—was an ancillary duty, taken during a rotation. Honestly, even battlecruisers are a little big for me. I hope I end up on something smaller when they start handing out permanent assignments.”
“And you?” Alysha asked Valery.
The Harat-Shar flicked his ears back. “Sometimes it’s nice to get lost in a crowd.”
Jae’en sighed and shook his head. “One of these days, arii.”
“Not today,” Valery said, reaching for his data tablet. But not before Alysha saw the slight smile on his face.
The interaction stayed with Alysha all the way to her cabin. The easiness between them, and the unlikeliness of Jae’en the extrovert wanting the smaller crew and Valery the introvert preferring the larger. What a waste it would be for Jae’en’s superlative talents in organizing groups to go under-utilized! But then, maybe he would be even better in whatever small group role he yearned for?
She padded into her cabin, checked the Flitzbe—peacefully sleeping in a heap—and was about to head for her desk when the computer chimed. Stopping, she said, “Forrest.”
“Sar here,” and the computer’s synthesis of the Naysha’s sign gave the woman an unexpectedly high soprano. “Will you please come to the machine room, alet? There’s a problem.”
“On my way.”

* * *
Alysha had stepped into the machine room while locating all the possible entries into the water environment, so she was familiar with it, insomuch as she could call herself familiar when it was all banks of mysterious computer consoles and even more enigmatic housings, tubes, and conduits. When she arrived, there were two humans bent over something that looked like a compressor they’d exposed by pushing up a hood. A third human was at a nearby console. And scowling on the deck beside the portal into the water environment was Wyn.
Alysha knew the Naysha were mammals and could breathe air. But she’d never seen one out of the water. Without water to give Wyn a context, he looked far more alien. And he was big in a way that water made it easy to dismiss. Probably nine, ten feet long?
The things he was signing hadn’t been taught in any of her courses. From the vehemence with which he was shaping them, they weren’t polite.
Her arrival didn’t cause the three humans to stop their work, despite the fact she outranked them. Alysha forced her ears to stay forward. “Wyn? Sar sent for me?”
Wyn twisted to face her, enormous body smacking the deck as he repositioned himself and propped himself up with his fins. He was signing so fast she couldn’t follow him, and she had to ask him to slow down, which did not improve his mood.
/I have told them there is no issue with the pump. They think it is a mechanical problem. It is not a mechanical problem! I am tired of telling them to stop chasing impossible theories! Look at them, they won’t even look at me!/
Alysha glanced over her shoulder, trying not to observe that they wouldn’t look at her either. “What seems to be the problem here, aletsen?”
That didn’t get her a response.
“Gentlemen?”
One of them glanced past his shoulder, raked her from foot to ear with a skeptical gaze. Said after a hesitation, “Ma’am. We’ve been assigned to identify an error in the alarming system. Lieutenant Beringwaite put us on it.”
“I’m aware of the problem,” Alysha said. “I’m the one who made the request.”
He nodded. “We’re eliminating potential causes.”
“It’s a tetchy problem,” the one at the console muttered.
“Is there a reason you aren’t working with the Naysha engineer?”
A pause. The one at the console said, “It’s not necessary.”
She didn’t know how to handle this level of obduracy. Had they been hostile, she might have had an easier time. But this? “You don’t know that. He has access to parts of the equipment you can’t reach.”
“If we cross out all the possible problems in the air chamber, we’ll suit up and check everything in the water,” the one at the console said. “We’re not at that point yet.”
“Maybe if you asked Wyn to check for the problems there, you could speed the process?”
All three of the humans looked at Wyn now. Even lacking the obvious signs a Pelted gave off with ears and tail and pelt, it was not difficult to see he was seething.
“I’m sure he’s checked everything he knows about,” the one at the console said.
Alysha was about to say something—though what she wasn’t sure—when the airlock opened for Beringwaite, who took in the tableau and said, “Thanks, Forrest, I’ll handle it from here.”
“Lieutenant Beringwaite—“
He met her eye and said, very clearly, “I appreciate your help. I’m here now, though, so there’s no need for you to stay.”
She tried not to bristle, but all the things she wanted to say scattered when Wyn grabbed the back of her tunic skirt and tugged on it once, hard. When she faced him, he signed, /We can’t find the problem if we don’t work together./
/Has the other lieutenant been here yet?/
Wyn eyed Beringwaite. /No./
Alysha sighed. Maybe Beringwaite hadn’t had a chance to discipline his people? Didn’t she owe him the chance? But she was supposed to be the interface between the water denizens and their land counterparts… she straightened and said, “I’m the liaison for the Naysha, Lieutenant. They asked for help.”
“We’ll handle it.” At her look, he said, “I learned sign. And anything I don’t know, the computer can translate.”
Another of those significant stares. Alysha glanced at the three human engineers, all of whom had stopped working in order to watch the confrontation. Better to let Beringwaite have his attempt and talk to him about it later than to air their conflicts in front of people they should be leading. Surely? “All right. Thanks, alet.”
Beringwaite nodded. “Have a good night, Forrest. All right, boys. Let’s chat.” As she stepped through the door, she heard him say, “This isn’t going to work.”
Alysha frowned. Had she been wrong to leave? She hadn’t thought of herself as averse to conflict. Reaching her quarters, she stopped in front of the window to the water environment and started as Sar sailed abruptly up to the pane. The Naysha folded her arms.
/The other lieutenant should be handling it,/ Alysha signed.
/I hope he does,/ Sar said. /Wyn is irritated./
/I saw,/ Alysha answered with a sigh. /I think he might have taught me signs I probably didn’t want to know./
/Did he?/ Sar’s hairless brow ridges lifted and a smile tugged at the corner of her wide mouth. /That must have been interesting. I guess he didn’t have time to tell you what they meant./
/I’m not sure I should ask…/
/But you should know,/ Sar replied with decisive gestures. /So you might as well show me./
/If I remember./ Alysha paused before raising her hands to add, /I needed to let the other lieutenant handle it. They’re his ensigns to discipline, not mine. They weren’t doing anything obviously wrong, other than disagreeing with Wyn about how things should be done./
Sar’s translucent second lids narrowed, filming her eyes. /I understand,/ she answered, the movements slower. /I hope your other lieutenant can fix it./
/Me too,/ Alysha signed, fervent.
/First mysterious sign now. Oh, that’s a good one!/

* * *
The skullbash and her excursion to the Naysha left her with too little time to catch up on all her reading before hitting the sack, which made her easy prey for Felix, who clapped a hand on the back of her chair the following morning and said, “Good news, Forrest! I’ve arranged with the prime shift to let you do the beacon testing today! We’ll be hitting five Well relays on this shift. You get to ping them, check the response time, and compare their internal maintenance record to the one in our database. Discrepancies get reported to the bridge. Can you handle that with those hollows under your eyes, or should I have you relieved?”
“No, sir!” Alysha blurted. “I mean, yes, sir, I can handle it. Thank you.”
The Seersa chuckled. “Please may I have another? Good attitude, alet. I’d look up the procedure if I were you. You have all of…” He made a show of turning to face the chronometer. “Oh, twelve minutes. Before we make the first pass.”
Alysha was already scrabbling for the right manual pages.
The work turned out to be tedious rather than difficult, as, she continued to discover, was most of the work on a ship. The worst of it was the maintenance record check; she would have thought the computer could have done a quick comparison, but the formats on four of the five relays didn’t match. She asked about it in a quiet moment.
“Ah, well,” Felix said. “Not all those relays were manufactured by the same contractor. Not all of them are even Naval issue. Some of them were emplaced by private firms or local government agencies. The tech’s the same, but none of the rest of it is standardized: not the maintenance schedules, or the programming that issues the alerts when they need repair, replacement, or upgrade. Some of them might get serviced by contractors, who themselves are contractors hired by the original contractors…”
“No wonder we need to check them,” one of the other ensigns muttered. “Sounds like a mess.”
“It works,” Felix said. “But understand this now: a job’s in the details, aletsen. If someone had bothered with the details when accepting bids for these things, well. We wouldn’t be wasting Lieutenant Forrest’s time on converting the file formats of their maintenance records.”
The final beacon spilled an enormous amount of code onto her screen when Alysha pinged it. As she watched, startled, the Songlance responded instantly, negotiated a handshake, and updated all its records. Looking over her shoulder, Felix chuckled. “There you go, Lieutenant. That’s one we built.”
“We encrypt the access to the maintenance records?” she said.
“Never know when someone might figure out how to use something to make mischief,” Felix said. “You wouldn’t want us to take any chances with the tech that makes it possible for us to communicate in a timely fashion with the entirety of the Alliance, would you?”
“No!” she exclaimed.
“Exactly. Better safe than sorry.”
How she survived that shift on the amount of sleep she’d gotten, Alysha didn’t know. But she stumbled out of it nursing the desperate hope that someone else would receive the beacon learning experience next.