Hospital Ship (The Rim Confederacy #5) (7 page)

"Then we're done here today. You may retire back to your quarters or go for dinner in the ship cafeteria if you'd prefer. Hungry, Captain?"

He nodded. "And will the food here be as much as I'd expect it to be ... pretty bland and tasteless?" he asked.

"It will absolutely be that—isn't that a hospital standard all over the galaxy? But if you'd prefer, up on Deck C—that's two up on the escalator—there is a small café. Walk counter-clockwise about a hundred yards or so and it's on your left—called the CPR Cafe—and the food there is superb!" Don't tell any of our cafeteria staff that I told you though!" she said and patted him on the shoulder.

He smiled, stood, and stretched his right arm out fully. "Thanks, Sam, muchly appreciated, Ma'am." He turned to his left to go out of the clinic, and he took the hallway down toward the center of the ship.

The line in the floor here was red, which meant he'd learned this was a clinic in the treatment wards, and he followed the red line of tiles all the way past wards, radiology, imaging, MRI/CT labs, and more. The list was long, and as he walked, he wondered if the few hundred beds in this area were enough. Of course, there had to be other areas. After all, this ship was the hospital for Neres, a planet with millions of inhabitants.

As he walked, he tried to fight off any kind of worries or anxiety. He knew, or rather, he had realized, the next few months were going to be difficult, but then that's the price he would have to pay for his obvious breakdown back at the OneTon. He didn't know if breakdown was the proper way to describe what had happened.

Remembering would be first.

####

The huge double doors to the RIM Council chamber had been open for almost a half hour and still there were members missing. The DenKoss members had all been switched over from their own traveling tanks to the special water tanks within the room at their places. Each of them, their scales rippling every so often, was talking amongst themselves—at least that's what the Baroness thought as she looked across the table at where her old seat had been.

Seated there was the Caliph Sharia al Dotsa, the previous vice chairman of the RIM Confederacy, now just a regular member of the Council.

And sitting in his old chair, right up beside the Chairman of the Council, was the Baroness as the new Vice-Chair of the RIM Confederacy Council.

She turned her head away for a moment to bask in an idea that had come to fruition. Admittedly, it had taken almost three Juno years to get from the first inklings of wanting to be the vice chair to today. Her first meeting as the vice chair was today. And the chairman was still not here.

She smiled a bit more, checked the Agenda at her place, and noted the variety of items the Council would be looking at today. All were unimportant to her—the real one she knew was item number eight.

She looked around again and noted still some holes in the seating.

There were forty members of the RIM Confederacy, and each seat at the table was for their head of state. Some, like Eran, were realms of a single planet; others like the Chairman's realm held fifteen different planets. Only the head of state sat at the Council table with the second row behind the various members holding seats for their entourage, which often included individual planet head of states.

As the Barony now held ten realm planets, there were ten seats behind her, and only four of them held representatives. She half-turned and nodded to her group and noted the Ikarian representative, Ahanu, gave back their sign of respect, and she dipped her head slightly to acknowledge his respect. She realized she could have given back that same Ikarian sign, touching the back of her right hand to her forehead and holding it for a second or two, but that would set a precedent she didn't want to acknowledge. Keep them in their place, she thought. After all, they were in fact aliens, were they not?

That made her smile and she turned back to the Council room. Looking up, she saw the vaulted ceiling with sweeping buttresses that drifted down to become the side walls and the general limits of the room. On the far wall, she noted the artwork someone had donated to the Council hundreds of years ago, but the artist and whoever christened him as such escaped her. Pictures of Randi waterfalls were one thing that existed almost everywhere on the RIM as art but not here. The pictures she was looking at were of a nebula off some star system, and the use of the blues and oyster reds and ocher greens was interesting. Too bad, she thought, that the vice chair wasn't in charge of the chamber artworks; wait, maybe I could be. She made a quick note on her pad to ask the clerk about that at a later date. Today, the big game was number eight.

She turned back to look at the Council table.

Where is everybody? The whole Council meeting was being held up because the chairman was missing as were the Ttseens and the Quarans too. The Leudies were also missing.

Made no difference to me, she thought, as this was small potatoes to such an august body. That thought brought a smile to her face, and on a beautiful woman, that was a good thing.

She toyed with her PDA, asked for an update on the Agenda, and found nothing had been sent out since the original had been Ansible delivered to her almost a week ago.

As she grew a bit more frustrated, the Council chairman strode into the chamber and made his way to the head of the horseshoe-shaped table, his six arms carrying books, folders, and tablets. Being from Elbo, the home planet of the largest realm in the RIM Confederacy, the Alex'n hegemony, he always came alone. No staff, aides, or even security accompanied him, and he settled into the big chair at the head of the table.

Before he did anything, he partly turned to her first.

"Welcome to the Baroness St. August and her new position as the vice chair of the RIM Confederacy Council. Nicely done, Ma'am!" he said, and she knew he recognized how hard she had worked to gain that traction.

She dipped her head and tried to hide the slight smile on her face.

Looking up at him, she nodded and said, "So nice to take on a new role here at the Council—you will find me a supportive member, Mr. Chairman," and she meant every word.

Until I can get the Barony up to sixteen realm planets and take over the whole Council, she thought as she dipped her head and they both smiled.

The chairman turned back to face the large horseshoe table of the Council members and begin the meeting.

While one hand seemed to be sorting various folders, another stacked up his books, a third was pressing buttons on a tablet, and a fourth grabbed a gavel and smacked the small wooden plate in front of his place at the table.

"Come to order, please, members ... come to order, please," he said and looked up at the council clerk sitting at her station in the middle of the large horseshoe-shaped table.

"Clerk, proceed, please," he said and his eyes never even looked at her as he was studying the tablet in front of him.

Rising, the clerk began the meeting with the reading of the usual first motion of all council meetings, the passing of the minutes of the last, which received no further questions or queries and it was quickly voted to accept same.

She snorted to herself as she remembered it taking almost four hours to get through that one when the trade wars between Faraway and the Leudies had come to a head and the compromise accepted was palatable to neither side with any degree of satisfaction. Too bad, she thought, when you run your realms based on trade, instead of production and advanced manufacturing, you were at the needs of the marketplace.

The clerk went on with the Regrets which explained that the missing council members had been slow to get to Juno and that they'd not bothered to take faster transport.

When your fastest ships go only one light-year a day, it was easy to see you had to leave in enough time to get to the monthly meetings. Or you used a destroyer that could handle two lights a day ... or—she smiled to herself—you could also use a Supra destroyer like her new Atlas that could do three lights a day, but then no one else here on the RIM had such a ship.

She remembered the Seenra ship that had shown up to collect payment for the Atlas, the Vegaw, captained by builder Spleesog, could do five lights a day. That was fast, and she wondered what such a ship might cost in the future and what the Barony might have to trade. That too, was on number eight today.

As the clerk got to the first item on the Agenda list for this meeting, it was apparent that the actual work to be done today would be "Council Light." Her attention wandered as the Council went through new talks on duties for new pharmaceuticals coming from inward as per the Leudi request for increases. That was tabled for later after staff could do a workup on cost comparisons, and she drifted off again for a while.

Tax increases on Eran were discussed, voted on, and passed.

Duos had asked for tactical nuke use in their civil war, which received laughs at first and then unanimous nays. She was careful during the discussion to admit she knew far too little about the whole civil war—and that in this case, she would need to abstain from any such vote until the Barony was brought up to speed on these new factors.

On Tillion, the much-closeted aliens were seeking the right to limit all ship landings to male only—which again was tabled. They also notified the Council that they were in the process of adding a new EL—a new space elevator, which they had tabled only as a point of information. However, as it was her part of the deal with Tillion, she broached the idea of the initial EL costs. She suggested the Council could consider this as one of the Confederacy initiatives that could come out of the huge fund the Council controlled.

As expected, that received a huge number of speaker requests on her console in front of her and she smiled.

The cost of an EL space elevator was huge; it required so much upfront planning that the feasibility study usually was the item that choked the project, but that didn't mean that some were still made. The successful ones were the ones the Confederacy funded hence her start of the whole process to gain some traction in the funding of the Tillion EL space elevator project.

She smiled a half hour later when the Council member from Roor supported the amendment from Skogg that the whole project have a start date within the next year or the Council Initiative fund be closed off to the Tillion EL.

As expected, she thought and didn't smile this time at all. Another one bites the dust.

Then Carnarvon offered up the notice there would soon be new technology they would be offering up for any planet using their volcano power stations, which received an enthusiastic round of applause as almost every planet on the RIM used volcano power. The Council supported almost anything Carnarvon did—she would have to check on them and she made a mental note.

KappaD reported new climatic changes that meant they would soon be facing some drought and famine issues due to lack of rainfall, which was highly unusual, and that received nods and even comments from the Master Adept, the woman who spoke for the Eons planet.

Eventually, the Agenda got around to the few items for discussion and votes. After two that mattered not a whit to the Baroness, the one she had come to the meeting for was the topic of discussion.

The clerk rose again. "Item eight today. The annexation of Ghayth by the Barony. Speaking for same is the Baroness St. August," she said and the light on the mic in front of the Baroness turned green.

She gathered herself together and spoke slowly and succinctly.

"As many of you know, we are looking to expand—as I'm sure many of you are too. Ghayth is a planet, number three in the Valissian system at the edge of the RIM Confederacy, and it is our intent to annex the planet, as it presently has no sentient life. No settlements, no inhabitants, no humans or aliens of any kind at all. It is a somewhat dreary place—much rain I am told, but it will suit our needs, and we ask that the annexation of Ghayth be confirmed," she said.

No one spoke.

The member from Skogg looked like he had something to say, his purple face looking at her directly, but he did not say anything.

"Anyone?" Chairman Gramsci, the Alex'n said, and not a soul said a word.

"Vote then please, Clerk," he said, and after a quick look down at her voting console, she noted that of the forty-member Council with only thirty-four present, the vote to allow the Barony to annex the new planet was carried.

"You do realize that this will expand the RIM boundaries, and there may be costs involved with the changes in boundary beacons and the like," the chairman said to her directly.

"Aye, Chairman, and we'd be fine with that," she said. She smiled.

Ghayth was the planet the anti-grav technology had been discovered on, and it was now hers. She smiled ever broader, which many at the table noted with questioning looks, but they had no idea what it meant.

But I do ...

####

Nathan took another big gulp of his smoothie and then turned over the last card on his console-gambling site and realized he'd busted out again. This new game wasn't hard to learn—but then no casino games were hard to learn. All you had to do was to pay the freight to play, and the game taught itself to you.

Like that's true,
he thought and noted that up in the top right corner of the screen, the flashing alert icon was now a solid flashing red. In moments, he knew that icon would shut down his current play and then—the dinging of the alert suddenly chimed once more, and the screen faded as a window came up on the console screen.

Yeah, yeah,
here's the stupid notice that my playing will now be cut off 'til I contact the casino payment offices—like I'm gonna do that.

He hit the big red switch and the console screen faded to black.

Before I can play again, I have to send in a payment.

He wished he hadn't been so bad lately when it came to his addiction. At least he had a good thing with Nancy, who he was very attracted to—and it seemed like the two of them had hit if off right away. They'd had a couple of great goodbye kisses just last night and that was good. Owing the casino was not so good.