Keelhauled

[Jane Hartman]

Jane Hartman

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The world was a mess. Particularly, the small part of the world that Hartman had control over.

One of Hartman's uncles had been a bear of a man, descended from some long-forgotten island chain where evolution had built human beings like mountains. Once a month, when Hartman visited his Vermont property, he would come home from church and drag an agricultural drone from beneath the house. The battered cream chassis, carefully polished and buffed over years, still gleamed in her memory. Every Sunday he would pull the drone out, and he would work on it, cradling it in his arms like an ill child. Occasionally, Hartman would pass him tools.

From the time she first walked down his driveway to the day she left for Carolina, he worked on that drone. It was never an obsession. An hour each weekend, no more, and no less. She never saw the drone work. Years later, when she returned to Vermont on leave, it was a shock to see it gone, the space under the house vacant.

Hartman had asked him about it, and he'd just gave a shrug like a creeping glacier. "It ain't that it refused to work. It refused to try." And that had been the end of it. Her uncle had found some other project to fill his time and Hartman had caught a shuttle back to the 4th on Pittsburgh feeling like she'd lost something she couldn't quite name.

Slowly, inexorably, the feeling that she knew exactly what he had been talking about was creeping up on her. She glanced at the clock on her display. Another five minutes. It wasn't that Valentine was just refusing to improve. She hadn't turned up. She was refusing to try.

The door slid open. Hartman closed Rivers's report, squared her shoulders and stood-

"Evenin' Lewis." She relaxed a fraction. Not Valentine. Disappointing, but not unexpected. Hartman waved him in, and Molloy closed the door behind him. "Glad to see someone in this organisation can still read a damn watch."

She gestured to a second seat alongside her own, both facing towards the door. The office had been Graham's - would be again soon, when she got around to signing the transfer paperwork - and being there still felt like squatting in someone else's house. "Appreciate you making yourself available on such short notice. Hopefully this ain't going to eat up too much of your time." But there's a good chance it will. "Trust you already know what all this rubbish is about?” Minor insubordination was hardly an offence worthy of court martial. But she couldn’t well sit there and let it pass, not from a Commander. Hell, not from a Recruit. So, she found herself sitting on her hands, waiting to yell at someone and wanting to yell at everyone at the sheer ludicrousness of it.

“Didn't happen to see Commander Valentine on the way in, did you?"

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