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PREVIEW OF PERIL
With a flag officer on board the easy life of an informal vessel would vanish and something of the formality of a big ship would take its place. The officers and crew would feel themselves under the scrutiny of higher authority no matter how hard the Commodore tried not to interfere with the working of the ship. And it naturally followed that the ship's commander would lose some of the joy in his independent command. Thus a happy ship would become a tight one ... QED. It was a situation as old as ships and men.
So there was little joy to be seen in the faces of Commander Scott and his officers when Commodore Hartnett stepped through the valve followed by his staff. Nor was their anything about Hartnett's appearance to suggest that they had been anything but right about the manner in which Flotilla Blue Three would be handled throughout the coming patrol. The Commodore was a model of military correctness, a martinet moulded in two Martian Wars and twenty years in space to a steely hardness that was disconcerting.
There wasn't a man on board who hadn't heard of Hartnett, of course. A gambler in combat, he had always managed to come out ahead of the game. His record was the record of practically every major achievement of the Force. Most of it could be read from the four rows of ribbons under his Command Pilot's sunburst.
There was the pale blue of the Terran Honor Medal that he'd won by ramming a Martian dreadnaught of the Diemos class with his crippled corvette off Io in the first Cat war. There was the red bar of the DSM received for leading the first deep-space expedition to reach Ariel and Oberon in the Uranian system ... that, before Blake had been born. And the rainbow colored ribbon of the old UN patrol, the First Martian Victory Medal, the Venerian Exploratory Medal, the Spatial Cross; four rows of them ending up with the General Service and Martian Occupation Ribbon.
All the way out to Luna Base from Hamilton Spaceport, the crew of the flagship had been muttering about the "damned brass-hat" who was going to disrupt the pleasant life of their beloved ship with his unwanted, high-ranking, stinking, presence, but the iron-hard reality of the man and the aura of confidence that emanated from him as he stood on the steel deck of the Control, spiked their guns too quickly. From the moments Hartnett stepped aboard, reflected Commander Scott bitterly, the ship tightened up. From here on in it was Hartnett's ship and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it.
"That Hartnett will take over your ship, Scott," Morrow had told him. "He can't help it. From the moment he steps aboard, it'll be his baby." And Hartnett was a gambler....
Scott presented his officers to the Commodore almost jealously, starting with the Executive, Lieutenant Commander Chavez and Lieutenant Horowitz, the Tactical Physicist; and ending up with Ensign Blake, the Junior Gunnery Officer, who was startled from his nervous fidgeting by the sound of his name.
"A reservist," was Hartnett's only comment, and though it was said in a friendly tone, Blake flushed furiously and wondered if it stuck like straw out of his ears.
"Mr. Blake is the Charles Blake who won the New York to Ley City amateur skeeter-boat race last year, Sir," explained Scott.
The Commodore nodded vaguely, his eyes wandering over the burnished chrome and steel of the Control panels. "Good sport, small ship racing, Mr. Blake," he commented.
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