"So, Captain,"
Rudof Dyll asked, his voice a smooth tenor, the series of silver rings that
lined both his earlobes twinkling in the subdued light, "what do you think
of our little lounge? Not bad? A bit gaudy, perhaps?" A lean hand,
bejeweled to the first knuckle on all fingers, motioned towards the dance floor
several meters below, where a number of couples—or in some cases, threesomes or
foursomes—were moving in varying degrees of attention and rhythm to soft music.
Some few meters
below, because Rudof Dyll's table was perched atop one of the several floating
balconies that drifted in carefully coordinated patterns above the floor level
of the lounge—now skimming above the dancers' heads, now approaching the transparent
dome that protected them from the near total vacuum without, a vacuum that made
the stars bright burning lights in the onyx sky.
Captain Eversyn was
not happy. Not happy at all. Actually, if pressed, he would admit—but not to
anyone else, only to himself, of course, and that in the dark and silence and
loneliness of his private domicile—that he was really happy nowhere but behind
a desk, bringing order to the chaos of reports and information, then storing
that order all neatly away in clearly labeled and docketed files. It was his
most secret, most hidden vice, and it would never do to allow anyone else to
know that about him. Being the tall, massive, heavily muscled captain in the
Consolidated Guard that he was, everyone took him to be ready at any time with
fists or weapons to bring, if not peace, at least some sort of armed détente to
any difficult situation.
But Carle Eversyn
preferred to deal instead…with paperwork.
It was his curse. It
was also, though he'd never realized it, his blessing, the means to his
constant promotion, and the real reason he'd been assigned to so many difficult
and dangerous situations on so many worlds. He had teams of eager fire-eaters
under his command, Baranin and others, armed and dangerous Connies who would be
happy, with any weapon at hand or bare fists, to break heads—or related organs
in non-Human species—whenever and wherever necessary to restore the status quo.
But how many of them
could write up a concise report, evaluate details, or make deductions from the
sometimes sparse information on hand?
Still, the Starview
was out of his ordinary haunts.
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