"She knows you've been cheating on her," said a bemused Florian Schwarz as he sipped from his coffee cup on the bridge. Breezewood's second officer's shift didn't start for another hour, but he wasn't going to miss a chance to watch the old man make a fool of himself.
"Nonsense," replied Seabourne from the helm instead of his usual captain's chair. "Everyone knows the Enterprise class has trouble with trade lanes." The captain furrowed his brow has he struggled to work the maneuvering jets to line up the liner with ring. A moment's hesitation before pressing a button betrayed to an eagle-eyed Florian that it had been a long time, perhaps too long, since the captain handled his ship. However even the most oblivious passenger would not have been able to miss that the Breezewood was now perpendicular to the tradelane, about as far from successfully docking as possible.
"Kind of you to offer the portside passengers a glimpse of a tradelane head-on. It's not a view you often get outside of a cockpit." "Thank you for the reassuring words, Florian. Now let me concentrate." "Fire the number three jets, that should set her-" "I SAID LET ME CONCENTRATE."
The bridge went deadly silent. Seabourne was master of his ship, no doubt about it, but he did not lead by iron fisted tyranny. If a crewmember needed chewing out, he delegated it to Oldham who managed to get the desired effect without raising her voice. In all his years on the Breezewood Florian had never seen his captain lose his cool. It took a minute for his fear to give way to concern.
"Captain, are you all right?"
Seabourne knew he was a proud man, knew he had a temper. A side effect of his jeux de vivre was that all of his emotions, including both joy and rage, tended to burn hot. He closed his eyes, counted to five, and let his hands drop from the panel. "Mr. Schwarz, if you would be so kind as to take the controls." Seabourne walked over to his captain's chair as Schwarz took the helm and corrected for his captain's mistakes. The liner slowly turned and backed up before sliding into the trade lanes.
With the ship safely in the lanes, Schwarz ventured a comment while he had the excuse of not making eye-contact as he checked his screens. "Did flying that Lucullus really rattle you that much, sir?" Seabourne gave a weary smile. "The Gallic liner flew like a dream, I barely had to do anything at all, which was good because all the commands were in French. Your suitemate will be pleased to know there is a bibliothèque aboard, but that's most of what I could recognize. The rest was mostly proper nouns and inferred guesses. I barely had to do anything truth be told to get her back to Curacao."
"I pitty their captains then," said Schwarz, "smooth seas do not make for skilled sailors."
"The Renzu was much the same way, though at least it was labelled in English. As an old liner Gateway of all people had, I would have expected nothing less, though the electronics and some things behind the maintenance panels are still in Kusari."
"Well, I imagine the language barrier won't be too tricky for Captain Dumas. Gallic is his native tongue after all."
"Truth, I'm going to be seeing a lot more of him in the upcoming weeks I think. There's a LOT we need to do to get that thing to work with our systems. We can brute force it by cannibalizing power systems from the weapons, of course, but I'd rather not send a liner out firing at only 10% of what she can. In any event, I guess I just wanted to get a feel for the Breezewood again, it's been too long since my last maneuvering trials with her."
"You do what any good leader does," said Florian, "You delegate. Your job is not to be the best at every task aboard the ship, your job is to ensure every task is done by whoever is best suited." Seabourne winced as he remembered Oldham saying something similar in his cabin earlier. He knew that both of his officers intended it as a complement. It came across as making him feel unneeded. Excessive. Supernumerary. "We couldn't do this without outr captain." Said Florian, as if reading Seabourne's thoughts.
Seabourne inhaled and counted to five before replying. "Mr. Schwarz, would you kindly take watch an hour early?" "Of course sir, let the record show I have the conn as of... 17:07." "I feel like you've had it for far longer," mumbled Seabourne as he left the bridge.
A concerned Florian slid into the captain's chair, still sipping his cup of Breezewood's house roast. Heavy lies the head that wears the crown, he supposed. He felt sorry for his captain, whose only crime was that his competence was greater than his desires. Every job that OS&C needed him to do, he had risen to the occaision. They confused his general enthusiasm for life and for the company with enthusiasm for titles. He only really wanted to be Captain of an OS&C liner. You could see it in the way that he made everyone address him as "captain" instead of chairman or director or senior editor or any of the other myriad lines on his resume. One day, he would have to pass off the duties of the Breezewood to be the corporate head the company needed. Until then, he'd continue to delegate and savor what moments he could with his liner.
As the helm officer moved to guide the ship to the next tradelane, Florian stopped her. "I think I'd like to take her under my own hand for a bit," said the second officer as stood up to take the helm once more.
