Foraker nodded in complete agreement. Anders had been a petty officer with over thirty-five T-years of service when Rob Pierre overthrew the Legislaturalists, but that was as high as he ever would have gone under the old regime, and that truly would have been a loss for the entire Navy. Like Foraker, his childhood experience with the old Legislaturalist educational system had taught him that he was going to have to teach himself anything he really wanted to learn, and that was precisely what he’d done. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been a Legislaturalist. In fact, his family had been Dolists, which had made his attainment even of petty officer’s rank quite an achievement.

But the destruction of the old Legislaturalist order, coupled with the People’s Navy’s desperate need for competence, regardless of its sources, had changed all of that. By the time Thomas Theisman shot Saint-Just (assuming that the rumors about the mechanics of the ex-Chairman’s demise were as accurate as Foraker strongly suspected they were), PO Anders had become Lieutenant Commander Anders. He might not have gone a lot higher even under Pierre and Saint-Just, though. In fact, he might well have found himself shot by the Committee, instead, because he had a contrary streak at least a meter wide. Somehow, he seemed to lack the admiration for the “People” which had been the magic key to promotion in the brave new world created by people like Rob Pierre and Cordelia Ransom. Personally, Foraker suspected that his contrariness stemmed from the fact that he knew he had overcome the limitations of his childhood and the People’s Republic’s ramshackle excuse for an educational system to make something out of himself and had nothing but contempt for people who hadn’t even made the same attempt.

However that might have been, she was delighted to have him as her chief of staff, and his promotion since the fall of the Committee was amply deserved. In some ways, she regretted pulling him out of his original slot in R&D, because he was one of the best practical engineers in the Navy, if not the entire Republic. Unhappily, she needed him even more where he was, interpreting for the engineers who had to communicate with those less gifted individuals who happened, in this less than perfect universe, to be their superior officers. And, she admitted, she needed him to do the same interpreting for her when she spoke to those engineers’ superiors.

Now, if the only people I had to communicate with were the engineering types themselves, she thought, maybe I could get Five back where he belongs. Unfortunately, this is the real world.

“I don’t know about the rest of the Navy, Sir,” she said after a moment, “but I, for one, am delighted to have him out here.”

“I’m delighted to have both of you out here,” Theisman told her with simple sincerity. “Lester Tourville told me you were the right woman for Bolthole, and the job you’ve done only reconfirms my faith in his judgment.”