The rest of the staff were less known qualities. Citizen Lieutenant Commander Julia Lapisch, his staff com officer, seemed a competent sort, but she was very quiet. Only a couple of years older than Tyler, she appeared to be one of those officers who had found survival by remaining completely apolitical, and she seemed to emerge from her shell only to deal with professional matters. Coupled with the slender, delicate physique her low-gravity home world of Midsummer had produced, she had an almost elfin air of disassociation, like someone not quite completely in synch with the universe about her.

Citizen Lieutenant Madison Thaddeus, his new intelligence officer, was another puzzle. At forty-two, he was the oldest member of Giscard’s staff, despite his relatively junior rank. His efficiency reports were uniformly excellent, and he had a reputation as a skilled analyst, with an ability to get inside the opposition’s head when it came to drafting enemy intentions analyses, yet he seemed stuck at lieutenant’s rank. That probably indicated that somewhere in his StateSec file (which not even Pritchart had yet had the opportunity to peruse) someone had recorded doubts about his political reliability. No other explanation for his stalled promotion seemed likely, yet the fact that he hadn’t been purged—or at least removed from so sensitive a slot as staff intelligence—would appear to indicate a rare triumph of ability over someone else’s paranoia.

Citizen Lieutenant Jessica Challot, his logistics and supply officer, was in her mid-thirties—again, old for her rank in a navy where the enemy and StateSec had conspired to create so many vacancies in the senior grades. Unlike Thaddeus, however, Giscard had an unhappy suspicion that Challot’s lack of promotion was merited on a professional basis. Her accounts were all in order, but she had a bean-counter mentality better suited to a shipyard somewhere than to a fleet duty assignment. Much as Giscard hated admitting it, those charged with overseeing the disbursement of supplies and spare parts at shipyards really did have a responsibility to insure that the materials they doled out were used as frugally as possible—consistent, of course, with efficiency. But it was a staff logistics officer’s responsibility to see to it that his CO had everything he needed (and, if possible, a little more, just to be safe) to carry out his mission… and to do whatever it took to provide anything his CO didn’t have. Challot, unfortunately, seemed to have no initiative whatsoever. She certainly wasn’t going to stick her neck out by resorting to unofficial channels, and Giscard strongly doubted that she would take the lead in anticipating requirements, either. Well, he could live with that if he had to, he supposed. At the very least, she appeared to be a competent enough supply clerk. If Giscard or someone else—like MacIntosh, perhaps?—did the hard work by figuring out what was needed and where it might be found, she could probably be relied upon to do the paperwork to get it, anyway.

He realized his thoughts had drawn him into contemplative silence and shook himself. It was time to get down to business.