Chapter Four
Uniforms
A half hour later, well into true night, Inquisitor L2 Nell Jones closes the file on her office's desktop computer and rubs her aching eyes. She'd hoped, when she'd returned after sunset, to report to Chief Inquisitor Henrietta Lange the final deposition of her Undercover case of the stolen Aztec jewels, go home and get some much needed sleep. Now she has the biography of the fictitious Petite Officer Second Class Elizabeth Willoughby swimming in her head and the need to leave by Five Hundred hours to report to the INS Prometheus, a Battleship docked at Naval Base Archer and to establish herself before it sails at Eight.
It is fortunate that the information on Willoughby is sparse; she's committed it to memory, then tugs the data strip from its port, thereby corrupting the information stored in it into an unintelligible mash that will require sophisticated techniques to recover, and will yield the searcher little. She turns off the computer rather than shuts it down to clear the unsaved information from active memory.
She stands, right hand tugs the silver gun from its cross body securement before her left hip and sets it on the desk. She'll have to sleep here tonight in the daybed at the left wall, so she starts around the desk to cross the room to lock the door, but the portal swings inward and halts her at the desk's rear corner.
Her first thought is annoyance at the unannounced intrusion, the second is that she's already set the pistol down beyond comfortable reach and the last is the sense of the inevitable as she sees black uniformed L1 Grisha Callen enter, his gold highlights gleaming in her avarice. She brings her closed right fist to her left breast, then out at full extension to him.
Saluting is an art, and she doesn't let show in face or manner that in the textbook acknowledgment of his greater rank she is picturing punching his throat.
x
"You killed Duchane too soon," Callen declares. "Sam and I had to search the entire house."
"Couldn't have been too difficult, you were only two hours behind me."
Callen stalks closer and for a moment Nell wonders if the flippant answer had been a good idea. She keeps her right hand close to, but not obviously too close to, her adamantium dagger strapped to her right thigh, pommel at palm height.
"Your attitude is going to keep you from getting anywhere, Two."
It's a thinly veiled epithet, far milder than she'd laid upon Beale, for though she is a Field Operative she is one rank below him or Hanna or Blye. By rights she should have been advanced, she does the same work and the lack of that gold stings, but there is little she can do about it.
"It was a judgment call," she declares instead, unwilling to back down even though he's less than an arm's length away. She keeps her hand still, four inches from the dagger pommel. It's a careful balance; he's close enough to be a danger, Callen is a sadist and she knows that any woman who lets him get this close while alone runs horrible risk, but if she misreads him and draws prematurely he'll give her ample reason, over several hours, to regret her final mistake.
She has, in fact, been with him for only one stretch of time, when she'd sought his help in advancing from a Level Three to a Two and out of Operations to a Full Field Inquisitor. She hadn't known then what he was like off duty, she'd been too green, too much a girl and hadn't deeply researched him beyond the basic accessible information. She'd seen him solely as Field Director of Blye and Hanna, first among equals. She'd thought him to be an easy mark for her nubile charms (she'd seen his eyes on her body a hundred times) and she'd believed his implication that she could buy her Two with the coin of her body and several trysts, a move that had worked so well with Beale from Five through to Three.
He'd drawn it out through several torturous sessions where she'd learned too much, and he'd come through only when, after a final grueling seven hour interview that she'd thought would break her, she'd won her Two. But she hadn't been able to enjoy her promotion; it had taken an additional five weeks for her breasts, her butt and her vagina to heal.
He doesn't use any of the traditional 'trappings' either; everything he does he does with his hands and other parts.
Eyes on his, she sees again that lack of mercy she's come to expect. And though she would return one for one, or try to, this time it is prudent to slowly move her hand away from the dagger, five inches, six, eight, ten.
She reaches for the top of her chair, turns it and, still searching his eyes for what his hands will do, she slowly sinks into it, now looking up to him, silent, the she-wolf turning over and showing her throat.
"Be ready on time," he commands. He turns and walks out her office door with the final insult of leaving it open.
She sits behind her desk, doesn't move to go close the door. The taste is bitter and she can't push it down.
xxx
Nell closes the top button of the white uniform half shirt and glares at the garment in the Wardrobe Room's tall mirror. As Kensi, wearing her own white two piece Petite Officer uniform, turns to her she declares with full vigor "I Hate the Navy."
"Why?" Kensi asks.
She'd thought she'd made her position clear when she'd first drawn the hanger from the bar and glared at the Petite Officer Second Class white uniform, unable to consider it more than an Undercover costume, yet still the woman asks.
"I joined INCIS so I would wear a decent uniform."
The white garments are split, white miniskirts below, while the half-shirts are each hardly more than halter tops above midriff that come to directly under their breasts, requiring bands of elastic sewn in to keep them from flashing everyone around them every time either raises an arm.
The shirt breast pockets - someone was being too damned literal - are places she'll never keep anything.
The half sleeves of her summer uniform - when is it not summer in Los Diablos? - display the red double chevrons that touch the hems of the sleeves while an inch down from her left shoulder is the Imperial signet patch while the right contains the emblem of the Prometheus, a yellow-orange blaze held in an open right hand.
The sole differences between their uniforms are the three red chevrons on Kensi's arms and the short row of medal bars above the pocket before her left breast.
"What's burning you," Kensi asks, "that I outrank you?"
"Of course not. You always outrank me."
"Then what," she asks with a companionable smile, half banter and half shoot-the-breeze, "that I have more medals than you?"
"One would be more than me."
"Would you like one? I don't care." She reaches to unpin one of them. It's a costume, she hadn't earned any of them.
INCIS medals are more explicit, you know what they're for and they need no interpretation.
"No, that's not it."
"Then what's got you in a funk? A First Class and a Second Class are less noticeable than two new Firsts."
Nell raises her hands over the uniform's short top. "It's demeaning."
Kensi smiles to ease her ire. "You have a cute belly." She looks below the skirt with its right uptilted hem that leaves her blade accessible. The white material, too light to make a decent skirt, flutters about her uppermost thighs when she moves, rides low on her left leg - if fingertip length can be fantasized as being low - but on her right side it's short enough to clear her dagger which is strapped to her upper thigh in the right position to leave the pommel at her palm. The white shoes are sensible for a moving, wet surface if hardly flattering by a millimeter. At least she'd managed to switch her INCIS adamantium dagger for the Imperial Naval issue, declaring the pommels similar enough that no one would notice and not caring if they did.
"And very nice legs. Maybe you'll nab more than a spy on this trip."
"Cute belly." The disgust is palpable. "Emperor Akin made this change, damn him anyway and–"
"Are You Out Of Your Mind?" is a frantic stage whisper as Kensi waves her to silence. "You do Not damn the Emperor, not even in here!"
Nell would protest but it'd be stupid. INCIS's mandate is to ensure the loyalty of the Navy and its land-use Storm Troopers. She realizes she's an idiot for speaking aloud. Todd Akin, no matter what she might think of things like his ever increasing herd of conscripted cuntubines, all brought on through 'legitimate' means, is the be all and end all of power. She can thank - whatever since there is no God, not since Empress Madalyn Murray O'Hair banned it from the Earth back in the 1960's - for a friend like Kensi.
Callen would turn her in to face punishment, and he'd gladly wield the whip, if he'd been here – not that either woman would allow that sexual sadist in while they were changing.
"I think it's sexy," Kensi covers, checking her uniform in the full mirror.
But even warned, Nell can't contain her disgust. "Sexy. You mark my words; in ten years this style will be gone and you will never see it again."
xxx
Riding in the rear of the black official INCIS vehicle, seated beside her partner, Nell reviews in her mind the scanty information on Elizabeth 'Betty' Willoughby when Callen announces "End of the line" and pulls to the curb.
She looks about. The residential street lined with one story houses and manicured lawns looks nothing like Naval Base Archer. "Where are we?"
"Five miles from the base, straight ahead," Hanna tells her, not bothering to glance back.
"Can't have two Petite Officers show up in an INCIS vehicle," Callen enjoys informing her far too much.
"He's right," Blye says as she gets out on the street side and rounds the car to the curb.
"Five miles?"
"Don't be late," Callen advises with his usual gentlemanly kindness.
"Oh, no, we won't be," she bites as she steps out onto the curb. She doesn't slam the door, that would be petty, but some day Callen will reach into an open door.
xxx
While the men, of course, go directly to the battleship in the black official vehicle and make excellent time, even in spite of the inch thick double reinforced chassis and armored under plating, the women take a bus to a block from the outer gates of the base and then, when they finally clear 'Pass and ID', they walk the three quarters of the mile to the docks.
They make the huge ship at 0717, forty three minutes before it's set to withdrew from the dock.
As they ascend the gangplank Nell outwardly ignores the Petite Officer of the Watch, a PO3. Even though they're dressed, hardly a term, as Petite Officers they outrank the kid who seems barely out of diapers, yet they salute the position if not the man, for an OD or a POOW does have a measure of authority as the guardian of the entrance.
"You're Late," he snaps at them.
"Excuse me?" As a First Class Kensi uses the right amount of outrage at his tone.
"You're due at 0700," he says, his eyes significantly on the small black canvas packs that they carry, which denote that they are new to the ship. A normal black canvas sea pack is large enough to contain a few essentials; toiletries, labeled underwear and so forth. An experienced Sailor knows not to count upon being issued properly sized underwear but to bring her own to a new berth until she learns the Quartermaster's sense of humor.
"You are not to come sauntering aboard when you feel like it." Kensi stares at the man, eyes to eyes, but he doesn't back down before a superior. "Well, get moving."
x
As they walk away neither woman can miss that three men, ensigns all, board the ship before they're out of earshot, and these are given a proper salute and they respond with half nods to their fellow, which further aggravates the younger, forcibly silenced Inquisitor.
Had she boarded in her space black uniform with its silver highlights she would have received the salute and very apprehensive eyes.
x
"Don't let it rile you," Kensi advises sotto vocé as they make their way down the first of several companionways toward Women's territory. The material of their skirts, fingertip length on the left side but high enough on the right to clear the hand high pommels of their daggers, are light enough to flutter about their legs and seem designed to catch any stray breeze. With the winds on the deck of a ship at even half speed, they will spend all their time indoors.
More than anything, this seems designed to emphasize not only the Emperor's tastes but filters down into the rank and file as the regard the Navy places upon their female crews.
"It's not riling me," she assures her superior in equally quiet tones even while looking forward to the day she boards the Prometheus again in her own persona and meets that pimple.
Of 4,287 officers and crew, 1,193 women wear the white halters and slanted minis, angled high on the dominant side where their daggers rest and she already knows that none of those brief uniforms she'll see are highlighted by gold trim. Oh for the day when a woman becomes a Naval Officer; Nell is sure she'll never see it. The highest rank a woman can attain is CPO and that took a lot.
They and their new crewmates are quartered in deck six of the battleship, where they are sequestered on their sleep hours and Nell is sure the division is not for the protection of the women's honor but so not one of them will ever have a bit of fun.
Unless, of course, any follow the bent that she and Kensi do; each is perfectly happy with either meat sticks or lips.
x
'Women's Territory' has no such name in the official sense, being no more than rooms where four bunks, stacked with twenty two inches of space between them are shared by twelve women. They find a room marked outside the door with ten names and while Kensi writes their names on the last two lines Nell stows the small black bag that contains her gear, such as it is, on the three inch thick mattress, third down from the top, level with her thighs, leaving the taller Kensi the lowest bunk which she will have to crawl into.
She turns and the three striped faux PO1 is standing before her. The woman cocks her thumb outward, her meaning clear. "Come on, I can't sleep on the floor."
"And had you asked, you might have gotten away with it, but RHIP and we can't show these women that we even know each other."
"Fine." She yanks the pack out, shoves it in the lowest bunk and stands with arms folded before her breasts. "Happy?"
"Ecstatic. But you know better."
There are small lockers set into the wall, eight inches high by twelve wide, little more than safe deposit boxes just large enough to admit, with effort and judicious packing, a standard sea pack. Only two remain with green tags in the locks, numbers 11 & 12. She opens the last, crams her bag in, yanks out the tag, looks around on the too brief uniform for a place to put it and finally has to push it into her breast pocket.
"Let's go, Petite Officer," Kensi says. "Good hunting."
xx
PO2 Betty Willoughby is assigned to Communications, a useful position as it will allow her to review all past messages and monitor new ones. Kensi is the INSIPS Officer on this tour, having replaced the previous Imperial Navy Standard Integrated Personnel System Officer on this tour. It's an equally useful location from which to identify the likely traitor / foreign operative. They'd learned of the switch in assignment for this other woman on the aborted drive in, but the reason for the switch has not been given to anyone aboard and most sailors are too intelligent than to ask.
Those who are not, well, they fall into INCIS' notice.
Grisha and Sam will work openly as INCIS Inquisitors and the women hope that their investigation, typically strong-arm as it will be, will cause enough stir that someone will say the right thing in their hearing. In the meantime, they will continue to do their own searches.
It would be nice for the Undercover Operatives to smoke out the culprit, but the fame – or infamy – of INCIS tactics virtually guarantees that the men will succeed first.
Nonetheless, their basic mission is unchanged. Pride sent them after answers, not a corpse.