Admiral Grimthorn handed her back her scanner and pulled the conference table over by his desk, along with one of the chairs.

"You can use this until we get you a proper desk," he said.

He looked at the console on his desk, but it was built into the surface and couldn't be moved.

"Stupid design," he muttered. "What idiot picked that out?" He turned to Kinnit. "Requisition yourself a console. Do you know how to get into the system for that?"

She nodded curtly.

"Yes, sir. All I'll need is your authorization."

"Good, at least somebody knows how to deal with these systems. Let me know when you need authorization."

She pulled up the requisition forms on her scanner, and began filling them out. She chose a decent console for herself, nothing too fancy, but nothing that would slow down her work.

Once the console had been requisitioned properly, she got down to business.

"Sir, may I help you organize your files?"

He looked up from his console with a start. His look of surprise was almost enough to make her giggle.

"What's wrong with my files?"

She looked down at the surface of his desk. It covered in crooked, leaning piles of slips, pocket drives, and the odd utensil or two left over from some late-night work session, an dystopian urban landscape of trash and old data.

"You... don't have trouble finding files in all this?" she asked.

"Of course not," he said, frowning. "I know precisely where everything is."

She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"Mostly," he amended.

"May I try, please?"

He grunted.

"Fine. Just don't mess with this stack here. That's what I'm working on right now."

"Yes, sir!"

Kinnit began immediately taking stacks of slips over to her table and organizing them. She took comfort in the easy routine of organization after her tumultuous morning. As she finished sorting each stack, she shuttled files over to the file bank.

Her mood slowly recovered as she focused on her work. Notwithstanding the day so far, she was still working on the finest ship under the greatest Admiral in all the Imperium.

She began humming, and kicking her feet under the desk as she worked, steadily chewing through the Admiral's piles of files. All the while, Admiral Grimthorn stayed focused on his work.

After a few short hours, the ceiling flashed. She squeaked in surprise, but the Admiral didn't even glance up.

"Lunch notice," he said without pausing his work. "Head to mess if you want. Level 12."

Kinnit nodded and stood. She paused, but it was clear that Grimthorn was not going to stop working for lunch. She considered skipping lunch, too, but she didn't want to set a precedent for skipping lunch.

With a salute that Admiral Grimthorn didn't even see, she turned and walked out to the lift. It carried her to the mess hall.

The bustle of the mess revived her spirits. She paused to drink in the ordered chaos. People of all species were getting their food, some with collars like hers, most in uniform. She thrilled as she grabbed her tray and scanned her card, feeding her nutrient profile into the system. The lady manning the counter raised an eyebrow as Kinnit's nutrient profile flashed up. She was tall and spindly thin, not entirely dissimilar in demeanor and shape to a spider.

"Oh, that's a new one on me," she said with a kindly voice. "I haven't met a Kobold before. You new here, hon, or just visiting?"

"Yes, ma'am! I'm Admiral Grimthorn's new Assistant!"

"Oh... you poor thing..."

Kinnit's smile grew a little fixed.

"What's wrong with Admiral Grimthorn?"

"Wrong? Nothing. Nothing as such. He just... he has a way he likes things."

"I gathered as much."

The server laughed.

"I'm a little surprised you're his Assistant. He doesn't usually have a lot of patience with the Subject Species." The spider-like lady gestured at Kinnit's collar.

Kinnit nodded, a little sadly.

"I... hope I can be a help to him, and the Imperium."

"You'll be fine. You seem sweet."

A line had formed behind her, so she had to collect her food and move on.

"Stop by any time for a coffee," the server called. "And let me know how it goes with the admiral!"

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I will!"

She sat with her food at a table in the corner of the mess. Ordinarily she loved being with people and talking to them, but for today she just wanted to watch.

In the vast, dead beauty of space, this little spot of light and life was what the Imperium was all about. People of every planet and galaxy, working hard to secure life and prosperity for everyone else.

And every one of them had their own unique story. She liked to imagine a story for each person.

That long, lanky Terran in greasy mechanic's overalls, for example: maybe he was once a ranking officer in a pitched battle and saved his squad, but the bloodlust took him and he savaged the enemy after they surrendered, so they had to bust him down because of his actions, but didn't want to discharge him because of his heroism, so he ended up as a mechanic in the Ninth Fleet.

And that Ursine lady who slouched in her chair with a flat expression of apathy, perhaps she'd once been a great beauty in an interstellar performing troupe, but after one of the other actors made one too many "unbearable" jokes, she'd struck out on her own, only to discover that the world has few favors for aging beauty, and had tumbled from performing for great crowds to shuffling papers in the Naval bureaucracy.

Kinnit had, perhaps, spent a little too much time reading lurid adventure novels.

She finished her meal, cleaned up and headed back to the admiral's office.

----------------------------------------

By early afternoon, the Admiral's desk was mostly clear. There was an orderly row of pocket drives to analyze later, and the stack of slips Grimthorn was working on, but the desk was otherwise unrecognizably clean.

Kinnit cleared away some of the old trash and dishes while he worked at his console.

"Done, sir," she said with a brisk salute.

His focus broken, he looked up in surprise again.

"What? Done?" He looked down at his desk. "Where's all my stuff?"

"Sorted and stowed in the file bank, sir."

"Nonsense. You can't possible have sorted everything that fast."

Her joyous smile grew and her eyes shone as she bounced on her toes a little.

"Yes, sir! Would you like to see?"

"No, I don't care about looking in the file bank. I just have to be able to get the data quickly when I need it."

"I can fetch what you need, sir."

"Okay, what if I need the minutes of the last CenCom general assembly?"

She bounced over to the file bank. After a brief moment, she asked "Do you want the official minutes, or the stenographer's transcript?"

"Uh. The transcript?"

She came back over and help out the slip with a huge smile. He accepted it mutely and scanned it.

"Okay. Well, that's what I asked for." He pinned her with a shrewd gaze. "What about the quartermaster's report from last quarter?"

"Well, sir, I can fetch you the slip, but if you want the numbers, you can look them up on your console."

"I can?" He poked at his console. "Right, right. I forgot." He looked up to see Kinnit holding another slip out to him. He added it to his work pile.

"Well. I suppose you can sort that fast."

He sat back and thought for a long minute, looking at her as she smiled with pride.

"You went through Academy, right?"

"Yes, sir. Graduated full honors."

He nodded.

"So you must have taken courses in navigation, correct?"

"Yes, sir. And Captain Hawkins would let me set navigation waypoints sometimes."

Admiral Grimthorn's eyebrows climbed into his scalp.

"Wait, Captain Hawkins let you touch his navicom?"

"Yes, sir."

Admiral Grimthorn sat back, troubled.

"Are we talking about the same Captain Hawkins? Thin, dark air, stupid mustache that looked like a caterpillar?"

Kinnit bit back a laugh.

"I think so, sir. He was very proud of his mustache."

"Huh. Well here, take a look at this."

He pointed her to his console.

"An exercise for you. We have three ships that need to rendezvous here, in Metabo space, near the spinward Raitis jumphole. They're located here, here, and..." he dragged the star map over a long way. "...here. How quickly can we get them to rendezvous, if we don't care about fuel use?"

Her brow furrowed as she worked on the problem. He watched her with an unreadable expression as she plotted waypoints and jumpholes. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth while she worked, giving her an appearance of fierce but cute concentration.

At last she stepped back.

"Done, sir."

He looked over her navigation plan.

"This ship is the farthest away. Why don't you have them heading out first? You don't have them even bringing engines online until three hours after the other two ships have left."

"They're right near a jumphole, sir, that will take them nearly to the rendezvous point in an hour or two. Even though the other ships start earlier, they have more jumpholes to traverse. This way, all three ships should arrive at nearly the same time."

Admiral Grimthorn suppressed a little smile. She'd found out his little trick question.

His brow furrowed as he noticed something else.

"But here, you have this ship taking a longer route. Why? They could hop these jumpholes here and here. Instead, you've got them navigating around in a huge arc."

"I've plotted to navigate them around that sector. That's Scradus space, sir. They're technically neutral to the Imperium, but I thought it would be best to skirt that sector, to avoid antagonizing them unnecessarily."

Admiral Grimthorn laid a finger across his lips, deep in thought.

"That's... very astute. How do you know about tensions with the Scradus?"

"It was in the last week's Naval strategic bulletin."

"People read those?"

The Naval strategic bulletins were written by career bureaucrats who had perfected the art of sucking every last drop of flavor out of the English language. He'd long wondered what undead creature would actually enjoy reading the written equivalent of sand.

He looked at Kinnit's earnest, shining face and realized exactly who would enjoy it. Because it was Navy.

He reviewed the rest of the nav plan and nodded.

"Very well. We'll use it."

"What?" she squeaked before remembering herself. "Sir?"

"Forward this to the bridge. They'll communicate the plan out to the fleet. We'll use your nav plan."

"M-my plan? B-but, sir! I've never developed a nav plan for more than one ship!"

"You just did. I've reviewed it and it looks good. Meets all our criteria."

"B-but, sir, you can't just--"

"What kind of Admiral-- what kind of leader would I be if I threw away a perfectly good plan just because I didn't come up with it? Send it."

"Yes, sir," she said quietly. She suddenly realized that under Admiral Grimthorn, her role as Assistant was far from a background job. She would be responsible. She would have an impact, whether good or ill.

She would change things.

A determined smile crept across her face as she thought of her people, most of them still trapped on their home planet.

"I will, sir! Thank you, sir!"

"Don't thank me, it's your plan." He turned back to his slips and began working again.

With happy determination, she forwarded the nav plan to the bridge. Her face flushed at the thought of three destroyers-- Imperium ships 250 feet long and bristling with the most advanced weaponry in three galaxies-- following her plan.

And if she could change the course of three ships, she could change the course of her people.

She could change it. She would.

The ceiling flashed again, red this time. She assumed it was the signal to end work for the day, but Admiral Grimthorn's head came up.

"It's an alert," he said. He checked his scanner.

"Insectoids," he hissed. "Attacking an undefended outpost. Stick to me, Assistant. We're going to the bridge."