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She was also conscientious and, although Denton had absolutely no intention of saying so to a single living soul, remarkably easy on the eye. She wasn't the very smartest junior officer he'd ever encountered, but she had a generous helping of common sense, and she was a long, long way from stupid. In fact, Denton was one of those officers who preferred attention to duty and common sense to erratic or careless (or, even worse, lazy) intelligence, and he'd been entirely satisfied with her performance since she'd joinedReprise's ship's company. That was one of the reasons he'd been giving her progressively bigger opportunities to demonstrate her competence and self-confidence, and, so far, she'd met all of them quite handily.
Which was what had led directly to her request for this interview, even if Denton didn't have a clue in Hell what was going on.
"He said he was going to formally complain about our 'harassment,' Sir," Monahan repeated now.
"Your harassment," Denton said in the tone of a man trying to get some ridiculous concept straight in his own mind.
"Yes, Sir."
Monahan sounded more than a little anxious, and Denton could understand that well enough. A great many junior officers who'd screwed up would make it their first order of business to get their version of what had happened in front of their commanding officers before any inconvenient little truths could come along to make matters worse. In Monahan's case, though, that very notion was preposterous.
"About the harassing you obviously hadn't done, Rachel. Is that what he was implying?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Had you done anything that could have gotten him pissed off enough at you to fabricate some sort of complaint in an effort to make trouble for you?"
"Sir, I can't think of a single thing," she said, shaking her head. "I did everything exactly by The Book, the way I've done it every time before. But it was like . . . I don't know, exactly, Sir, but it was like he was waiting for me to do something he could complain about. And if I wasn't going to do it, then he was ready to claim I had, anyway! I've never seen anything like it, Sir."
She was obviously even more confused than she was worried, and Denton made another mental check mark of approval for her end-of-deployment evaluation. Despite her evident concern that he might wonder if she was trying to cover her posterior, she'd reported the entire episode to the XO as soon as she'd come back aboard ship. And the XO had been sufficiently perplexed—and concerned—to pass her report along to Denton before she'd even left his office. Which was the reason Monahan was now sitting in Denton's day cabin repeating her account of the customs inspection.
"So you went aboard, asked for his papers, checked them, and did a quick walk-through, right?"
"Yes, Sir."
"And he was giving you grief from the very begi
"Yes, Sir. From the minute I cleared the perso
The young woman—she was only twenty-two T-years old—had clearly never experienced anything like it. Denton had, on the other hand, although it had usually been from a Solarian merchant spacer, not someone from New Tuscany. Some Sollies went out of their way to attempt to provoke a Manticoran officer into providing a basis for complaints and allegations of harassment. It was something Astro Control back in the home system encountered with depressing frequency from Solarian ships passing through the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, as well. Some Sollies simply resented the hell out of the fact that a single little out-system star nation dominated such a huge percentage of the League's total carrying trade. They went around with planet-sized chips on their shoulders where the Star Kingdom was concerned as a consequence.
But the Sollies who did that also knew they were representatives of the Solarian League. They were armed and armored with all of the arrogant Solly assurance that there was nothing any mere Manticoran could really do to punish them if they got out of line. That was one of the things Denton himself personally most hated about Solarians. And it was also what puzzled him about this incident, because New Tuscany was a single-system star nation, so poor it didn't have a pot to piss in. So what could possibly possess a New Tuscan merchant skipper to risk deliberately antagonizing the Royal Manticoran Navy here in a star system which had just become Manticoran territory?
"Sir?"
Denton shook himself back up out of his thoughts and looked back at Monahan.
"Sorry, Rachel." He gave her a quick smile. "Wool gathering, I'm afraid. You had something else you wanted to add?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Well, add away," he encouraged.
"Sir, it's just, well . . ." She seemed a bit hesitant, then visibly steeled herself for the plunge.
"Sir, it's just that I had this fu
"What do you mean?" Denton's eyes narrowed.
"It was more like he was talking about me than to me," she said, sounding as if she were picking her words carefully, trying to find the ones to explain whatever it was she was groping towards. "Like . . . like somebody in one of the Academy's training holos, almost."
"Like he knew it was being recorded," Denton said slowly. "Is that what it felt like?"
"Maybe, Sir." Monahan looked more worried than ever. "And it wasn't just me he was complaining about, either."
"Meaning?" Denton tried to keep any note of tension out of his voice, but it was hard, given the mental alarm bells trying to ring somewhere deep down inside him.
"Meaning that he didn't say just 'you' when he was complaining about what a hard time I'd been giving him. He said that, but he also said things like 'you people,' too. Like there were dozens of me, all trying to give him and his friends trouble."
"I see."
Denton sat in thought for several more seconds, not particularly liking the speculations chasing around the inside of his brain like hamsters in an exercise wheel, then returned his attention to the ensign sitting before him.
"Rachel, I want you to know that you did exactly the right thing reporting this. And that neither the XO nor I believe for a minute that you did a single thing wrong aboard that ship. I don't know exactly what his problem was, but I'm sure you handled yourself just as well as you always have in the past."
"I tried to, Sir," she said, unable to hide her enormous relief at his firmly supportive tone. "The more it went on, though, the more I started wondering if I had done something to tick him off!"
"I doubt very much that you did anything at all," Denton said in that same firm tone of voice. "Unfortunately, you may well encounter the same thing again. God knows most of us have run into it a time or two, although it's usually from the Sollies, not from someone like the New Tuscans. I'm sorry it happened to you here, but it's probably just as well to get the first dose out of the way early in your career."
"Yes, Sir," she said, and he flashed her a smile of approval.
"All right," he said with an air of finality. "I think you've probably given me everything you've got, so there's no point our sitting here chewing it over any more or wondering what kind of wild hair might have inspired him to go off that way. I would like you to go ahead and record a formal report on this, though. If he does actually decide to complain to someone, I want to have your version of the encounter already on the record to help shoot him down."