Читать книгу Remnants of Trust - Elizabeth Bonesteel - Страница 12

C aptain Shiang is pregnant.

The corridors leading to the gap that had been the engineering section were largely intact, and Elena and her team were able to move quickly. She unrolled light strips methodically onto the walls as they progressed, all of her movements on autopilot. Such an odd thing to fixate on, the PSI captain’s round stomach; but with everything she had seen since the battle, that had been the most unexpected.

She felt herself growing angry with Greg. He should have known this; he should have warned her. But of course he would have no idea why such a thing would bother her, and it wasn’t like she was prepared to discuss it with him now. Too much had changed between them, and she was still too uncertain of what they had become. She might never find the right time to tell him.

Only once before had she seen a pregnant woman on a starship, and she hadn’t known it at the time. For those five days she had looked in the mirror each morning and noticed nothing different. Not until the pregnancy was lost and over had she known it had existed at all.

Stress, she told herself. This is all distraction. Set it aside, deal with it later. Remember why you’re here.

The damage to Exeter’s engineering section had been relatively contained, the ship’s modular structure keeping the adjacent corridors almost completely undamaged. They came across one section where the wall had gone missing, exposing the corridor to space; the ship’s environmental system had managed to extend oxygen over the breach, although not gravity. Elena let Darrow, the platoon leader, leap over first. The soldier then extended her arm and pulled the others over, one by one, with Elena last.

She wondered if, under ordinary lights and populated by a working crew, she would find the halls familiar. She had spent a year of her life here, the turns and levels becoming second nature. But after almost eight years away, she found most of her memories were emotional: her hideous naiveté when she arrived, so certain that she had found her path, that she would serve out her career on board this ship; her realization that the hazing and the insults and the subtle acts of subversion were not an initiation, that Captain Çelik preferred his people insecure and off-balance. Less than six months into her first, coveted deployment, she had begun to search for a way off the ship.

And then Canberra had happened, and all her priorities had changed.

They walked the perimeter of the wreckage, alert for intruders; but all they found were more of Exeter’s crew. They stumbled on nearly three dozen of them, mostly techs and medical staff, holed up in an interior space, shivering in the dark and awaiting news. Greg promised to send a team for them, but Elena traded one of her infantry for a medic and left them behind with some of her temporary lights. Purely psychological, leaving them with one soldier; but in their place, she thought she would want the reminder that they were not in danger anymore. And she was hoping she would need the medic with her team.

But the others they found were beyond help.

They came across a group of six who had all been burned, a quick, white-hot flash leaving them unrecognizable. Elena wanted to scan them herself, wanting to know if she recognized a name; but she realized, as Exeter’s medic knelt before them, that they were not her dead. She watched as he slipped a gloved hand behind their burn-contorted necks to scan their ident chips. There was nothing in the charred flesh, in the holes where the eyes had evaporated, that the medic could have recognized.

“We’ll collect them,” he asked her, rising to his feet, “won’t we?”

He was a little shorter than she was, and roughly the same age. She wondered if her eyes, like his, looked centuries old.

“All of them,” she told him. He nodded, and they moved on.

The limpet had left a shuttle-sized hole in the wall of the corridor. Exeter’s automated system had done a good job of sealing out the vacuum, but managing a space that size would drain the batteries far too quickly. “Captain,” she said, “we’re going to want generators. A lot of them. It’s going to take some time to seal this.” Regardless of what she had told Çelik, she wasn’t ready yet to give the ship up as lost.

There was a pause on the comm, and she tensed. “Shimada is pulling some equipment together,” he said. “I’ll have him add generators to the list.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Not on an open comm, Commander.”

Her first response was annoyance—why does he always pull rank when I ask something important?—and then she realized what he was saying: he had received confirmation from the Admiralty. They would not be sealing the breach. Her list of damaged equipment would be listed as salvage, and Exeter would be scrapped. It would have been obvious to anyone who was thinking clearly, but now was not the time to say it out loud.

“Exeter can hold the vacuum out for a few hours yet,” she told him. Without waiting for him to give the order, she turned to Darrow. “I’m heading out. Sweep this area, and get any survivors behind the central bulkhead. Once we’re sure it’s clear, we can expose this section.”

If Darrow had put together the implications, she kept her reaction to herself. She nodded to Elena, and led the rest of the infantry down the hall toward the brig.

Elena checked the seals of her environmental suit, and stepped forward to the blown-out hole. She could see vestiges of quick-drying foam sealant around the torn metal edges of the opening. It would have been easy enough to modify a standard consumer-model shuttle to secrete foam on impact; it would be a simple inversion of a land-model safety feature. Easy enough—low-tech, even—to make the shuttle a missile to punch through an exposed interior wall and create an airtight seal.

Somewhat less refined than the fleet of advanced fighter drones, but much more in keeping with the inept piloting of the drone that had hit the ship.

She attached her tether to the interior wall and stepped through the hole, feeling a familiar lurch as she shifted out of the gravity field, and a strange sense of claustrophobia as her suit’s interior began generating its own heat. Keeping one hand on the edge of the blown-out opening, she looked up and down the ship’s exterior.

From a distance, she had seen Exeter’s build structure, all arched ribs and level separators at right angles. Up close it was chaos: scrap metal, polymers, and fiber, burned and torn as if some massive animal had pulled it apart in a rage. She reached out and tugged at a line; it came loose, and when she pinched it between her fingers it turned to dust.

Too much heat, she thought. “This is more than just a short-range generator explosion,” she told Greg.

“Can you identify it?”

She pushed off along the hull toward another cluster of fiber. “I expect so. Standard incendiaries will leave residue.” She took a handful of lines in her fist and tugged experimentally; these were less decayed. She pulled more steadily, and they came away from the hull. “If the drone had some kind of hybrid battery—son of a bitch!”

Reflexively she released her clutch of fibers and pushed away from the hull. What she had pulled away from the interior was a body, bloated and unrecognizable, its exterior covered in a thin sheen of ice. Regrouping, she tugged on her tether and brought herself closer to it, closing her hand around its arm to keep it from drifting free.

“Chief?” She became aware that Greg had been calling her name repeatedly.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, as steadily as she could. “I believe I’ve run across one of the enemy.”

Up close she could make out more details. The clothing it was wearing was dark brown, thick and sturdy cloth, but nothing like an environmental suit. Not a Corps uniform, which meant it was one of the raiders. Some kind of infiltrator caught in the blast? Piloting one of the ships she had thought was a drone? She tugged him forward, examining the alcove she had pulled him out of. She could see nests of fibers and polymer sheets moved to one side. The body had been shoved there after the blast. And from the look of the remains … he had been alive when he had been exposed to the vacuum.

She hooked her arm through his rigid elbow and pulled on her tether, hauling herself back through the opening. The abrupt gravity yanked the body from her grip, and she caught at him, unable to prevent him from dropping, stiff and undignified, to the floor. She stepped over him, leaning against the wall.

“I’m not a medic, but it sure looks like death by decompression,” she told Greg. “If he hasn’t got an ident chip, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting a name.”

“Don’t go back out there alone, Chief,” he said. “That’s an order.”

An emotional one, she thought, then looked down at the corpse. Inhuman, at this stage, distorted and hideous.

Murderer.

“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged. She was far too close to all of this, and Greg knew it, too.

“Chief?” Darrow said. “You inside?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Aft. By the brig. We found two more bodies, ma’am, one raider, and one of Exeter’s people, but we’ve got one alive. One of ours. Looks like he was guarding the brig, but it’s been blasted open.”

She began heading down the hallway. “Had it been inhabited?”

“Hard to tell, and the officer isn’t talking yet.”

She rounded the corner, and came across the raider first. Despite being free of the ravages of the vacuum, he was, in his brown uniform, as nondescript as the other one. She put his age at something between thirty and forty, but his slack skin was already sinking into his cheekbones. He could have been much younger. His features were neutral to the point of blandness: regular, symmetrical, echoes of a dozen different ethnicities easily projected onto his bone structure. She wondered if he’d had himself altered to be ordinary, or if his ability to blend in had led him to a life of theft and rootlessness.

No way to ask him now.

He had taken a shot directly in the sternum, and his chest had collapsed with the impact. She wondered if it had been a quick death, if he had blacked out and felt no pain. She hoped not.

She stepped over him to the other body, sprawled out on the deck, staring sightlessly upward, her unlined face forever stilled. Young. Maybe new. Maybe not even out here a year. This was not what she would have hoped for when she chose her deployment, the ship on which she would live her entire life.

Beyond her, Elena saw Darrow and the medic crouched before another soldier, slumped against the wall. Elena knelt down with the others. He was a sturdily built man around her own age, breathing but unconscious; the medic was administering something with a dermal patch.

The man shifted and his eyelids fluttered, and she felt her heart thumping against her chest. She took a quick look at his uniform. “Lieutenant. Can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me.”

A small sound pushed its way through his lips. If the ship had not been so cavernously silent, she would not have heard him.

“Come on,” she entreated. Cautiously she extended a hand and touched his arm; he shifted again.

“… sorry …” he murmured. His eyes opened, staring at nothing.

“Lieutenant, do you know where you are?”

“Sydney,” he said. His unfocused gaze had wandered to the dead woman.

“Is that her name?”

He swallowed. “Dead now.”

“I know, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

He did not respond, just kept his eyes focused over her shoulder. “Sorry,” he said again; and as she watched, his eyes grew damp.

She rubbed his arm, helpless. “Just hang on. Help is coming.”

He shook his head. “No help.”

We came as fast as we could, she thought; but that was her excuse, and it gave him nothing. She kept her hand on his arm, hoping the contact would give him something to focus on, a reason to fight back.

“Who is it?”

Greg’s voice in her ear, normal and familiar. The medic responded. “Lieutenant Farias,” he said. “He took plasma fire. I think it was either him or Sydney who took out the raider.”

“Ask him if the raider was the one in the brig,” Greg said.

The medic gave Elena a look, but shifted to one side so she could question the injured man. “Lieutenant Farias, were you and Sydney on duty? Was there a raider in your brig?”

But he had started closing his eyes again, and she could not be sure he had understood her. “No help,” he said again. “I’m sorry, Sydney.” And he fell unconscious once more.

Elena stood and moved away, letting the medic tend to him. She could not see where he had been shot, and she wondered instead if he had been beaten, if he had taken a blow to the head. “Did you get that?” she asked Greg.

“Not much to get,” he observed. “Will he live?”

Elena, who had not had the heart for such bluntness, looked at the medic, who nodded. “Can’t say for sure,” he equivocated aloud. “The concussion is pretty bad, but he’s got no fractures. As long as he doesn’t fall into a coma, he should recover in a few days.”

“Not sooner?” Greg asked.

The medic’s lips thinned with disapproval. “You want guarantees, Captain, you won’t get them from me,” he said shortly.

Greg was silent for a moment. “Chief, on a private line, please.” When she changed over, he said, “Are you okay there?”

She knew what he meant. “I’m better off here than home chewing on it,” she replied. “I want to get through this debris, and bring home some evidence.”

It was Greg’s turn to be silent, and she could see his face in her mind, knowing something was going on with her, uncertain of what he should do about it. Kindness. So often kindness from him, these days. She wished she could trust it.

In the end, he let it go. “All right, Chief,” he told her. “Carry on.”

She waited until they came to carry the injured lieutenant away, and then she reattached her tether and went back outside alone.