Читать книгу Remnants of Trust - Elizabeth Bonesteel - Страница 15

All the way back to Orunmila, Guanyin stayed silent, listening to the others talking in subdued voices about what they had seen. She stared out the window as her ship, intact and safe, grew larger in the shuttle’s front window. The last few hours had been a blur of faces, some injured, some panicked, all stunned, as Exeter’s surviving crew members had regrouped and recognized what had happened to their home. To her consternation she found herself cast in the role of savior, and more than once was subjected to a grateful and rather desperate embrace. One man, some years older than she was, had started to weep, and she had held him as gently as she could until Keita’s people brought in a medic. Keita extracted the man from her arms with more compassion than she would have credited him with, and traveled with him back to Galileo with the other wounded.

She had thought Commander Shaw’s assessment had been premature, but based on what she had overheard, the crew fully expected that Exeter was going to be scrapped. Another incomprehensible Central custom. Apart from the destroyed engine room, the ship had sustained very little damage. Guanyin thought her own people could have repaired it within two months, given the parts. But there was more to it than that, she learned as she absorbed snatches of conversation: it seemed Central was inclined to quietly retire ships that had suffered such devastating damage. Instead of harvesting older ships to repair Exeter, Exeter herself would be parted out and recycled; and Captain Çelik, regardless of how well he recovered, would likely be shuffled off to some sort of bureaucratic position.

And that, she thought, as Cali maneuvered the shuttle into Orunmila’s fore hangar, would be the end of him.

She unclipped her harness and rose absently to her feet, hanging on to the hand grip toward the ceiling. It was none of her business how they dealt with their officers. After ten years as second-in-command and six months as captain, she should have learned how to let go of anger over things she could not change. At least this time she could funnel it into something useful.

Yunru was waiting for her on the tarmac, his arms full of their two-year-old daughter. Lin’s dark head lay against his shoulder, her round arms locked around his neck. Even from a distance Guanyin could see the child frowning. She quickened her step, leaving Cali behind.

“What is it, my little gumdrop?” she asked as she approached.

Lin turned and held out her arms, her face dissolving. Guanyin met Yunru’s eyes as she relieved him of his burden, bouncing Lin gently and rubbing her back as she snuffled noisily into Guanyin’s neck.

“She wanted to wait up for you,” he said. “I told her no. She has been objecting for the last three hours.”

Overtired and unhappy, just like Mama, Guanyin thought. “Lin, my love, I miss you, too. But you must sleep, dear. And you must listen to what your father tells you.”

Still carrying Lin, she fell into step with Yunru. “I’ll hang on to her if you like,” she said. “You get some sleep.”

He gave her a curious look. “You look like you need it more than I do.”

“I may,” she conceded, “but I’m too furious at the moment to close my eyes. And I have to make a comm.”

There was a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Don’t curse in front of her, okay? She’s too good a mimic.”

“It won’t matter,” she said, giving him a smile. “I’ll be speaking Standard.”

He leaned over to rub Lin briefly on the back. Lin made an angry sound of objection, and nestled herself more firmly against Guanyin’s neck. Guanyin would have chided her, but Yunru just smiled and headed back to the suite they shared with the children.

By the time Guanyin reached her office Lin had stopped crying, and grown drowsy against Guanyin’s shoulder. She shifted the little girl as she sat, and took a few minutes to whisper to her gently until she fell asleep. It was a bad habit to instill, she knew, letting the child doze off in her arms; but soon enough Lin would be too old for it. Cali always told her she was worse with the children than she was with Samedi. Which was, Guanyin reflected, perfectly true, and one maternal luxury she never intended to give up.

When she placed the comm to Galileo, she kept the vid turned off.

They had an officer filtering all incoming messages. He sounded young, and appropriately intimidated when she identified herself, and she felt a little better. By the time Captain Foster came on the line, she had resurrected all of her outrage.

“Captain Shiang,” he began, in that measured, polite tone of his, “on behalf of Central, I wanted to thank you for coming to Exeter’s aid. She would not have survived without your assistance.”

Chanyu had spent a lot of time teaching her manners. She had never much cared for them.

“From what I have heard said,” she told him, “Exeter did not, in fact, survive. Is my understanding correct?”

A pause on the line. “Yes,” he said, and she was surprised at his candor. “But that doesn’t change the fact that three hundred people are alive now who would not have been if they’d had to wait for us.”

“PSI are not so cynical as you are, Captain Foster.” Her rage felt cold; she wanted him to feel cold as well. “We do not let any ship fight off such an attack alone when we are able to help. We would even help Galileo, if it came to that. But now that the crisis is finished, we must leave you.”

“Captain Shiang,” he said, “if this is because of our earlier exchange—”

“It is not.” Full points, though, she had to admit, for his being willing to shoulder the blame. She had read that he was an honorable man. It was the only consistent thing in all of the reports of him she had found. “Captain Foster, do you know how many people I have on my ship?”

“Eight hundred,” he replied. He sounded resigned, and she wondered if he already knew what she was going to say.

“And are you aware that it is my personal responsibility to look after each one of those people?”

“I believe our respective services view the role similarly, Captain.”

Do not try to ally yourself with me. “I will help any ship in distress, Captain, but I will not give assistance to an organization that has chosen to use subterfuge to obtain our trust, that has deliberately concealed intelligence, and that allowed us to enter a volatile situation with insufficient understanding.”

There was silence on the line again, and this time she waited for him. But when he spoke, he sounded genuinely confused. “What are you talking about?”

She felt a sudden desire to shout at him. Captain Çelik would not have bothered pretending; he would have told her flat-out that he had lied to her—or better yet, he would have been up front to begin with. “Do not tell me that this attack was not anticipated,” she continued over his objection. “You assign an additional Corps warship to this area, just before an organized Syndicate raider attack? On a scale that has not been seen in this sector in twenty years? Why is it that we were closer to Exeter than you were, Captain? Why was it that my people were first in the line of fire?”

“Exeter was first in the line of fire, Captain Shiang.”

“I am not interested in your self-righteousness,” she told him coldly. “I am not comming you to listen to more prevarication. I am comming you to let you know that once we have a tracker report from the escaped raider, we will be leaving this area, and you may pursue the criminal on your own.”

There was a brief silence. “You’re really going to ignore what happened here?”

Let him think she was foolish enough to let an organized attack pass without investigation. “Once we have given you the raider’s location, we have no intention of engaging in further contact with you or your ship.”

“Is that just Galileo, or Central in general?” She could not be certain, but she thought she caught a note of humorless dryness in his tone.

“I will accept reports on Captain Çelik’s condition,” she told him, without answering his question. “Should you find the accused raider and exact your justice, we will hear of it without your help.”

More silence. “How many Central starships have you dealt with, besides Exeter?” he asked.

Damned if she was going to tell him that. “Raiders rarely have a range of more than twelve hours,” she said. “I am expecting a signal before that time has expired. When we receive the information, we will transmit it to your ship, and our interaction will be concluded. Am I making myself understood?”

“Very clearly, Captain Shiang.”

“And please tell your Admiralty,” she added, “that they need expend no more energy trying to ease our concerns about their troop buildup here. PSI’s allegiance is to each other. We will continue to battle the Syndicates and their raiding parties as we always have—by ourselves. Your allies are your own problem. Good evening, Captain Foster.”

She cut him off and looked down to find Lin staring at her, her dark eyes wide open.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, dear,” she said gently.

Lin blinked. “Samedi?” she asked.

Guanyin carried the little girl through the interior door into her quarters. On the other side the rest of her children slept, and one room beyond that, Yunru was, with any luck, getting some hard-earned rest. Guanyin felt immeasurably better having had her say; she thought her gnawing worry over Çelik might settle enough for her to get some sleep herself.

Samedi, who had been dozing on the couch, looked up when she came in. She laid Lin gently next to him and went for a blanket. When she came back, the ordinarily irrepressible puppy had curled up against the little girl, who had hooked an arm around his neck. I should let her train Samedi, Guanyin reflected. He is certainly more mindful of her than he is of me.

She shook out the blanket and pulled it over the pair, then tugged off her own uniform to get ready for bed.