"I'm afraid that's not up to you. You're unfit for duty right now, and I'm within my authority to keep you here. Which I will."
You moved to hoist him up and he pushed away like you were coming to attack him.
"I can't! I'm… I'm still on duty." He pleaded. He'd be stoic up until this point, but this was putting him over the edge. This wasn't a sense of duty, this was terror.
"Unfit for duty means relieved
of duties, sailor. Anyone who has a problem with that has a problem with Navy regulations."
That didn't seem to reassure him much, but it stopped his panic, and you managed to get the injured sailor onto the nearest bed, found something to stem the bleeding from his nose, and wet a cloth with cold water to put against his swollen eye. There wasn't much else you could do: you weren't trained for this. You also made a point to order him to stay in bed, or there'd be hell to pay.
A few minutes afterward, as you washed the blood off your hands (Commoner blood.
Gross.) the door to the sickbay was unceremoniously thrown open. You turned, expecting the Chief Medical Officer, or at least an orderly, to instead find a wirely little Ensign with a half a moustache, not much older than the sailor still propped up in bed. Behind him were two petty officers.
"Nakada, you worthless fuck! Get up!" The ensign screamed. The seaman did his best to get up and to attention, but his balance failed him as his feet hit the deck and he flopped unceremoniously against the floor. One of the petty officers immediately went to his side and grabbed him by the collar to drag him up.
You protested, but were simply ignored.
"I didn't see you back on deck. I should have known you'd come here to hide behind a woman's skirts like the sissy prick you are!" The ensign continued his tirade, seemingly ignoring your presence in the sick bay.
"Ensign!" You tried to intercede, raising your voice to try and interrupt, but he ran roughshod over you, as he continued berating the sailor, who was being roughly held in an upright position that didn't look conducive to his recovery.
"Fucking
shit! If I didn't know it would cost the Navy money to send your ashes home I'd toss you over the fantail myself, you puke."
"S-sorry, sir, I--" The sailor was trying to apologize and not making much headway in being heard over the positively abusive dressing down he was being given. After raising your voice failed, you decided to escalate, grabbing the ensign by the arm and pulling him around. As you did, you couldn't help but notice the narrow white and blue armband of the Purity Club on his uniform.
"Ensign! This man is unfit for duty. As the ranking medical officer present, I've ordered him to get bed rest until he's fit again! You can't just barge into a sick bay and manhandle my patients!" You said, with more conviction than you felt. You were no doctor and this felt like a gamble.
"He's
fine. He's just a malingering little coward." The Ensign sneered. "I won't have you telling me how to handle my men."
You inhaled sharply and summoned up all the regal authority that had been taught to you as a girl.
"With all due respect."
Listen up, fucko. "He's been placed in care of the ship's sickbay, and the officer in charge of that sickbay has authority over their patients. The CMO, or those acting for them, also have a duty to remove problematic people from sickbay.
You are being a problem. This man needs
rest!"
You were not, really, acting CMO right now. Nobody had delegated that you. But they also weren't here, and medical officers had a lot of authority and leeway over patients.
You don't think the arguments necessarily got through to the Ensign, but what it did do was make him realize that maybe he was pushing a boundary he ought not cross. In a huff, he left the room, the petty officers just letting Nakada crumple back on the floor.
You helped the seaman back in bed, and once again stopped the bleeding, which had restarted the second time he hit the floor.
"Seaman, what's that officer's name?" You said. Somebody was getting a report written up about him.
"Enighn Kuwahara, s-s-ma'am." The seaman stuttered.
"Is he always like this?" He shook his head.
"No, ma'am. Uh, our section had a man written up on shore, ma'am. He was probably ordered to, ma'am."
"What was the man written up for?" It must have been
serious of the officer had been ordered to come down so hard on his men.
"He was improperly dressed, m-ma'am. We were having a good time and he left his cap at the tea house…"
Okay, maybe not so serious.
"The captain is really big on proper uniforms, ma'am," the seaman added, clearly trying to be helpful.
Not so big that he was stopping officers from wearing political symbols. You ordered Nakada to stay right where he was, and you sat down to do some paperwork and wait for the CMO.
---
Eventually, you were informed by another Ensign passing by that the CMO was on leave until the ship left the day after tomorrow, but fortunately some of his assistants made it on board and took over care duties. You impressed on them the importance of keeping Nakada in sickbay at least another day: not that you knew, but it might give the poor kid enough breathing room to recover and for his superiors to cool off. You packed up what stuff you had and headed out: you needed something to eat, badly.
Unfortunately, when you opened a hatch onto the deck, you'd found it was already evening, and you were now well off-duty. You read the letter again, as if checking if the words were still there.
Nope. You were ordered to your cabin.
Fuck.
You made your way to it, where you found a man posted with a sidearm near the door. Right, for your
protection. Well, if it was going to be like that, you might as well take advantage: you ordered him to get you some food, and while he had orders to stay at his post, he also had authority enough to yell at passing seamen until one of them could be made to do it for you, without you having the indignity and risk of breaking orders to hunt down somebody who would.
Your cabin probably wasn't originally intended as one, maybe being a storage closet or something. There was a faint smell of bleach about the place, either from what was originally stored here or from the effort to clean it after it was repurposed. There was a small berth set up (not atop a steam pipe this time!) and you even had a tiny desk with a proper lamp. Compared to your last quarters, roomy. Luxurious, even.
You found yourself missing the Kishimoto's tiny, cozy family home.
Resting on the desk were a few items for you. One was a copy of
The Way, the Navy's internal newspaper, which was pretty much run by the Purity Club. The other was, accordingly, one of the armbands you'd seen on Ensign Kuwahara. Finally, there was a small box of chocolate. Well, that was nice at least. Your sea chest was already stowed neatly at the back of the room.
Right now, you ought to be having dinner with some of the other officers, and you resolved that the first thing that would have to change was this infuriating curfew. You knew your cousin was a fickle man; he probably thought it was funny, and would lose interest after it became inconvenient. You'd be doing your best to make it inconvenient, but until then, you were stuck in a five by three metal box with a desk lamp.
You had some books and other diversions you'd pick up on furlough, but you didn't want to get started on any of them now: you'd bought enough to cover short evenings of rest over the course of a patrol, not what was essentially confinement. Instead, you picked up the newspaper and gave it a read.
It was hard to avoid the Purity Club in the Academy. It was their main recruiting grounds, after all. You didn't really have a great grasp on modern democratic politics, but you understood the basics of what the party stood for: tradition, strength, domination. Like your cousin, you were an adherent of the new constitution and supported the democractic government. It was important that the people have some say in the affairs of state, and you weren't foolish enough to believe in an enlightened autocratic monarchy like some of your family. There were plenty of examples in Europa and elsewhere of how well that worked in the modern age (just look at the Caspians), and you weren't interested in losing your heads like the Gallian royal family had over a century ago.
You remembered talking to her about it when she had first assumed the throne, twelve years ago. You'd been… still not 10, yet, and she'd looked so regal. The young empress, serene even with the passing of her mother, the throne changing hands when they were both too young.
---
"Mitsuuuuuu," you had peered at her with intense admiration and more than a little foolish, youthful jealousy. You had wanted to be Empress and wear the pretty clothes and have the fancy palace and all the servants who would do whatever you told them to and all of that super exciting stuff you were sure Empresses' got to have. She had smiled at you indulgently in her fancy robes and things and patted you on the head as she pulled you into her lap.
"Hana, dear, you must refer to me as Empress Mitsuko now. It's only proper," she had said.
"Okay. Sorry, Empress Mitsuko." You had been a rather rambunctious child. You'd sat up straighter.
"Do you get to tell everyone what to do now?" You'd asked.
Mitsuko had laughed.
"Not exactly. Remember, the people of the country get to elect a Diet that decides what the government does. I only give advice. And even then, only in the most extreme circumstances. It is better for us to remain above such matters. For the good of the nation."
"What? Why? Didn't the Empresses in the old stories get to do what they wanted and tell people what to do?"
"They did. But this is a modern age, not the days when an Empress could take up her bow or spear and get on her horse and charge off to expel the barbarians or unite the country with her armies. The Prime Minister arrived today in a
horseless carriage, and I don't know the first thing about motors, or trains, or most of the problems people have now. The duty of the Empress is not to rule the people, it is to guide their hearts. Like a lighthouse, or a lamp lit in a window to show that someone is at home."
You don't know if your cousin even remembers that day, or that sage advice amidst her busy life. But you took it to heart, and it led you here.
---
The Purity Club weren't republicans, but they weren't monarchists either. They claimed to revere the Empress, but so did every other party, except maybe the United Communist League (you were pretty sure some of them did, though). They wanted strong military leadership, a new shogun of sorts. They wanted land, power, order, and purity of race and spirit. There were dozens of little parties like them all over the world, popping up in the last few decades, and here they'd taken a stranglehold on the young men of the Navy and those who admired them.
Their beliefs had simple, shallow underpinnings; the world was inherently chaotic, and people were too. All things would fall to ruin without order, tradition, and a sense of shared identity. You were with it so far, but then the shape of that order quickly revealed itself to simply be naked power. They spoke of high ideals, but a quick read of the stuff they put out to their true believers would quickly disabuse you of that. Their leaders wanted the absolute authority to 'solve' any problems that came up using direct methods, justified by the encroaching of infinite enemies at the gate, with no thought to sustaining the state through anything but fear and violence.
You knew enough history to know what they proposed wasn't a government, it was a suicide pact. And over the next few days, you realized with horror that it was happening here, in microcosm aboard the
Hachinosu.
The officers treated the men less like sailors or workers or even servants, but more like animals, who had to be controlled at every step lest their chaotic natures take hold of them. To prevent a sense of solidarity among the enlisted turning resentment into mutiny, they turned them against one another. Whenever there was a mistake or transgression, or even just if a sailor happened to be nearby at the wrong time, the man would be taken belowdecks and handed over, not to petty officers or men assigned to security duties, but to the man's comrades. Either they punished him, or they'd all be next.
While the officers were not so violent to each other directly, there was a sense of vicious competition between all of them. Those who had the captain's favour got everything: the best cabins, the best duties, long leave, praise and good reports. Those who fell out of favour were snubbed and had their authority slowly restricted. There was a divide even in the wardroom, the place where usually there was warm camaraderie between officers. Those who wore the armband all dined together at one table while those few who still refused to compromise their own beliefs or simply refused to join in Hisanobu's perverse playacting at holding court sat at another.
And at the center of it all, the strongman. Your cousin, Captain Nashimoto. You'd learned his leadership style was to give few direct orders over the structure of the ship, concerning himself only with, essentially, where it went and what it did when it got there. That meant that everyone competing for his favour had to anticipate what he might want, judging from the few decisions he actually did make. He hadn't written up that list of extreme regulations you'd received on your first day. He probably hadn't even seen it. It was the result of his underlings pushing the standards of discipline higher and higher, looking for his approval.
The executive officer, Lt. Commander Uozumi Teijo, was a joke. A fawning little rat of a man who had obviously reached the highest level of his own incompetence and had found a patron willing to overlook his faults and foibles as long as he continued to enforce the petty rules and crank the discipline as tight as he could while not pushing the men into outright mutiny. You suspected that if the pressure was turned up any higher that might be the result, even if they did keep all the sailors divided and fearful of punishment.
This ship was going to explode. Figuratively, and then maybe literally. You had a duty to fix it.
Sitting in your little office, eating the last of your chocolates and setting aside the day's paper as the ship got underway, you found yourself grinning, despite it all.
You were going to topple your cousin's little empire, and it would be delicious.
Would you play his little game though? Make him think that you were in his control? Or would it be all the better for you to be seen to openly flaunt his clear desire for you to knuckle under to his pretensions of being a medieval daimyo?
Vote 1:
[ ] Wear the armband.
[ ] Don't wear the armband.
Vote 2
Pick All You Desire. Each costs 2 Stress.
[ ] Form a Squad: Your cousin got away with it because everyone was too busy competing with each other, and everyone else was too fearful. If you figured out who the reasonable officers were and got them on your side, you could change the culture of leadership for the better.
[ ] Infiltrate the Hierarchy: Authority and duty on this ship had little to do with rank and much more to do with favour. If you got on your cousin's good side, you could parlay that into a position where you might get to make real change.
[ ] Be The Good Officer: Everyone was too worried about their career to dare to cross the captain. Your career was already a mess from day one. By making an effort to be a reasonable model officer, you could give the men a contrast and the other officers an example.
[ ] Look over the Books: Captains and officers had huge leeway over discipline in the IAN. Physical punishment was not uncommon. But this was simply beyond the pale. Somewhere, they crossed a line, and if you nailed them on it, that'd knock the wind out of their sails.
[ ] Write In: Maybe there's something you haven't thought of yet. You'd need to be careful, though, so bad ideas will get vetoed.
