Читать книгу Remnants of Trust - Elizabeth Bonesteel - Страница 17

Greg poured a generous measure of whisky into the glass on his desk, and nudged it in the direction of the officer sitting across from him. “Start from the beginning, Commander.”

Dmitri Keita glanced briefly at Elena, seated beside him, before reaching out and lifting the glass. He sniffed it first, then raised his eyebrows and sipped. Greg was surprised; Commander Keita had not struck him as a connoisseur. Under the circumstances he would have expected the man to gulp the liquid, but even traumatized he clearly recognized quality. Greg felt briefly ashamed of the amount of the stuff he had guzzled unceremoniously when he was still drinking.

Quality had not mattered to him at all.

When Elena brought Keita to his office, Greg had resisted the urge to call the man “son.” Despite being only three years younger than Greg, and fully as tall, there was something in his face: an earnest innocence that suggested vulnerability. Elena had hovered over him like a worried parent, which had puzzled Greg at first. All he knew of Keita was what he had read in her official report of the incident on Canberra, nearly eight years ago now. She had not seemed protective of Keita in the report. Indeed, she had emphasized the team’s dependence on his strategy and marksmanship, and his bravery when rescuing the infant. Over the years she had spoken only obliquely of Canberra, and almost never of Keita, although Greg knew she kept in loose touch with him.

She perched on the edge of her chair now, leaning toward Exeter’s second-in-command, her eyebrows firmly knit together, fairly vibrating with focus on her old friend. An unwelcome thought wandered into Greg’s head, and the urge to call the man “son” vanished, replaced by the need to keep the exchange professional and as brief as possible.

Keita took a breath and leaned back, his hand still curled around the whisky. “We were back on Earth three weeks ago, a little after you were,” he said. “Everyone was still talking about you two, but nobody really understood everything that happened. At least nobody at my rank.” He was quiet a moment, and Greg wondered if Keita thought he would elaborate. “Nobody much thought about MacBride—his trial was a lot less high-profile than yours, and he never had your … celebrity. Sir.” Keita shifted, and Greg sensed disapproval. “But most of us figured, well, he’d screwed up, and someone was taking care of it. Right? Because that’s what we do. We figure out how to punish people, and we do it, and it’s sane and sensible and all in the interests of the Greater Good.” Greg heard the emphasis in his bitter voice.

“And I wouldn’t have thought about it at all anymore, but the day before we left Captain Çelik called me into his office, took everything off the record, and told me we were going to be transporting Captain MacBride to the prison system out by Xihoudu. I didn’t understand why it needed to be secret, but I didn’t ask.”

Greg interrupted. “Who else was assigned to the task?”

“Initially, only me, Farias the brig officer, and Doctor Lawson, but Lawson had to pull in a team.” He turned to Elena. “That’s how Jimmy got involved.”

“Why did you need a med team?”

Keita shifted and dropped his eyes, taking a moment to sip the whisky. “They transferred him to us unconscious, sir. Drugged. Told us he needed to be fed intravenously, because he’d been on a hunger strike.”

That, Greg thought, made no sense at all. What could MacBride have hoped to gain from a hunger strike? “Did your doctor confirm that?”

Keita nodded. “But that’s not why he brought Jimmy—Doctor Youda in. Lawson let the drugs wear off the first afternoon. Said he wanted to examine MacBride, and he wasn’t going to do it while the man couldn’t speak for himself. And … as soon as he woke up, Captain MacBride started ranting. Screaming about being set up, about injustice, calling the Admiralty a pack of cowardly murderers. That sort of thing.”

Now that, Greg thought, sounds like MacBride. “Who heard him?”

“I did, sir. And Doc Lawson, and Jimmy.”

“What did you do?”

“Doc Lawson drugged him again,” Keita said, and Greg thought he disapproved of that as well. “He told me MacBride was a danger to himself. But he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he said it.”

Lawson’s name, Greg remembered, had been on the casualty list. If he had known more than Keita about what was going on, he could tell no one now. “What makes you think the attack was over MacBride?”

Keita’s eyes met Elena’s again, and Greg saw her nod, almost imperceptibly. “It’s an anomaly, and I suppose I am assuming the anomalies are all related. Using a starship to transport MacBride, the Syndicate attack on a Corps ship, their disproportionate firepower—” He stopped there, and Greg wondered if he was including Exeter’s feeble attempts at self-defense in his mental list. Instead, he added something that required more imagination than Greg would have initially suspected of him. “And the timing, sir.”

“Timing?”

“I’m not privy to most of it, sir, but Captain Çelik does talk.” He exchanged another glance with Elena. “You being here in the Third Sector, after you were exonerated.” Greg didn’t correct him. “And nobody understanding exactly what happened out there with PSI, or even really what MacBride did or didn’t do. Captain Çelik says nobody can even cogently explain why he was court-martialed.”

“Incitement to war,” Greg said automatically. In reality, of course, it was for disobeying orders; but the branch of the Admiralty who had given him those orders could not charge him with insubordination without admitting they had given the order in the first place.

Keita made an impatient gesture. “Whatever the charge, sir, are you going to tell me all of this is happening now for no reason?”

“Coincidences do happen.”

“Bullshit, sir.” His eyes blazed, and Greg thought under other circumstances he would like Keita. Instead of rebuking him for the outburst, Greg held the younger man’s gaze steadily, and after a moment Keita shifted and dropped his eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain.”

“Given the day, Commander, I’ll let it go,” Greg said. He avoided looking at Elena. “Why do you think it’s bullshit?”

“Because …” Keita was struggling. “It can’t be coincidence. Not like this. What happened to Exeter … you can’t tell me that was for nothing.”

Keita looked suddenly vulnerable again, and Greg felt exhausted. So many things did happen for nothing, but he did not think this distressed officer could stand to face that just now. He needed to get Keita out so he could unravel this with Elena. “Thank you for your time, Commander,” he said. “You’re dismissed.”

Keita processed the abrupt order, but he did not lose his temper this time. He stood, saluted stiffly, and turned.

“Commander,” Greg called after him. When Keita turned back, he held out the open bottle of scotch. “Take this,” he said. “Share it with your friends.”

Keita gave him a puzzled look, but wrapped his fingers around the bottle and nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and when he left he looked a little less stiff.

Greg sat down again, and ran his hands over his face and into his short-cropped hair. Elena was watching the door where Keita had gone, and he had the distinct impression she was avoiding looking at him. “Smart guy,” he remarked.

“Yes,” she said absently. “He always was.”

“How long were you involved with him?”

She turned back, surprised. At another time he would have laughed at her; she was always startled by how transparent she was. “About three months,” she said warily. “Maybe a little less.”

“Do you trust him?”

At that she sighed and slumped back in the chair, exhaustion washing over her face. “I am not objective about Dee,” she said unwillingly. “Which is to say that yes, I trust him, but I recognize at this point in my life that my instincts about such things are not always particularly accurate.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

She nodded. “But whether it’s the whole truth, I don’t know.”

“He may not know the whole truth.”

“Do you ever get tired of all this secret spy bullshit?”

He had grown tired of it the moment he had lost a member of his own crew to it the year before, and a single casualty paled in the face of what had been done to Exeter. “There’s no reason Keita would be involved in this,” he argued aloud. “No reason Çelik would be, either. Or anyone else on Exeter, really. But someone is. The coincidence that your friend doesn’t want to see is not that it all happened now, but that it all happened at once. And maybe that Orunmila was close enough to defend. I’m not convinced there would have been much left of Exeter if they’d had to wait until we got there.”

“I don’t like PSI being pulled into this. Too many admirals in Shadow Ops are ready to use them as a catalyst for war.”

“Not going to do much good when they’re throwing their ships bodily between ours and the enemy, and shifting broken bulkheads to rescue our injured officers.”

“It’s awfully risky for them, though, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Who? PSI?”

“Shadow Ops. Assuming they’re the ones behind this. Exeter’s a well-known ship. To finance an attack … of course other ships were going to show up to help her. They couldn’t possibly have been confident of a victory.”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but they got one, didn’t they?”

“I’m just thinking it might be a coincidence after all.”

He shook his head. “With what Jessica found in their weapons systems?”

“I know.” Exhausted again. “I just—I’m not Dee, Greg. I want it to be an accident. Bad timing. A rogue Syndicate tribe, a random equipment failure, them grabbing a prisoner just for the hell of it. I know there has to be more to it, but God, it’s awful enough without adding conspiracies on top of it.”

The final list had been ninety-seven people. A full quarter of Exeter’s crew. Greg had sent the list back to Central, and had offered to help notify the families. Ordinarily, that would be Çelik’s job, but Greg wouldn’t hazard a guess as to when the man would be up to it. He was not sure he himself could be up to such a job, were it his own crew.

He agreed with Elena. He wanted Keita to be wrong as well. He wanted this tragedy to be one rogue, stupid Syndicate tribe, and nothing more. He wanted to take the revenge the Corps would demand, to pursue and destroy the tribe that did all of this, and ignore the tendrils that reached out into secret areas of his own government, areas half his own chain of command didn’t know existed.

There were so few of them who knew the whole story, and only one person who had been through it all with him. And he needed her thinking clearly, instead of dwelling on the horror.

Which is more than I have the right to ask of anyone.

“We need more information before we draw conclusions,” he reminded her. They were missing too many pieces. He had no doubt someone had gone after MacBride, but he couldn’t yet understand why.

Elena’s shoulders straightened, just a little, and some of the tension left her. “When will we hear from that tracker?” she asked.

He rubbed his eyes again. “Captain Shiang thinks somewhere in the next five hours or so.”

“You talked to her.”

“After a fashion. She commed me earlier to tell me to fuck off.”

Elena’s eyebrows shot up, and to his amazement she looked faintly amused. “You personally?”

“Kind of, yeah.” He related the conversation, such as it was. “And you know, Elena? I hadn’t thought of how it must look to her. One minute I’m playing the friendly representative of the Big Bad Admiralty, explaining to her that no, really, there’s no special reason we’ve deployed an extra warship in the area, and the next someone’s actually blowing the hell out of a ship she’s worked with.”

“It matters to her, doesn’t it? Exeter.”

“I think if Central really cared about getting Shiang on their good side, they’d have had Çelik talk to her years ago.”

She was silent a moment. “Greg, why didn’t anyone tell us about MacBride? Why was the transport classified in the first place?”

It was a good question. “Your friend Jimmy Youda was a pretty weak link,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but be fair: he wasn’t in on it at first. And Jimmy gets spiky when he’s upset. I don’t think he’d be a security risk under ordinary circumstances.”

And that thought bothered Greg. In the last several decades, Central had been fortunate: Corps deployments were often relatively uneventful, the kinds of troubles they ran into small, familiar, and manageable. But no Corps soldier should allow themselves to forget that extraordinary circumstances happened. He wanted suddenly to talk to Çelik about Exeter’s crew, and whom Çelik himself trusted. Greg shook his head. “This whole business stinks. I don’t even know if I should comm back for orders. If it was Shadow Ops that grabbed MacBride, anything the Admiralty might tell us right now is probably bullshit.”

“Greg,” she asked suddenly, “do you think Herrod is part of Shadow Ops?”

Greg had spent the better part of a month pondering that question. “He may not be officially on the payroll, but he knows what they get up to.”

“He gave us good advice,” she recalled. “To stay together. To be careful.”

It took Greg a moment to catch on to what she was saying. “You think he’s on our side.” He shook his head. “It’s dangerous to assume that, Elena. Half of what he’s said to me I have a feeling is off the record. We always need to assume when we talk to him we’re talking to them.”

“Still. I think if you contact him as part of the Admiralty—”

“—that he’ll give us real orders?”

“As opposed to running us into another raider attack? I think it’s possible.”

“ ‘Possible’ is a little hair-raising, Elena.”

“So is what happened to Exeter,” she countered. “Greg, they’re going to expect us to find out about MacBride. If we don’t comm back for orders, what are they going to assume?”

How do we live like this, he thought, second- and third-guessing every single word anyone says to us anymore? He rubbed his eyes. “Jessica’s already filed the preliminary report. The Admiralty has agreed to quarantine the area. But I don’t want to ask them for anything else until Jess finishes dissecting Exeter’s logs, and we get something back on that tracker. I don’t want to risk getting sent off somewhere we don’t want to go.”

“Do you think you can still get away with that kind of thing?”

“What kind of thing?”

She gestured into the air. “This thing you do, where you get an order and you ignore it, until you decide how to convince them to give you what you want.”

He blinked; he had never thought of it like that. “You think I disobey orders?”

“I think you interpret them creatively. Greg, after all this, they’re going to be a lot more careful with you than they have been.”

He had felt it already, the subtle shift in power that came from not being an unquestioned hero anymore. He had never cared much about his reputation, but now that it was damaged he was beginning to recognize its usefulness. “They can be careful once we know what’s going on,” he told her. He watched her haul herself wearily to her feet. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to talk to Çelik,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because as we stand here chatting about whether or not our own people are after us, I’d just as soon have Orunmila on our side. And you said yourself Captain Shiang cares about Exeter. Maybe Çelik can talk her around.”

“I’ve already sent Jess after him.”

“You afraid of us tag-teaming him?”

She sounded mildly amused again, and the moment felt familiar, the way they had been with each other before everything had gone to hell. “I’m just suggesting that he might not be especially receptive to you just now.”

He could order her to leave Çelik alone, and she would obey him; but he understood her thinking. She had a preexisting relationship with Çelik. He remembered the other captain’s notes on her transfer orders: If she doesn’t learn to keep her mouth shut, she’ll either get tossed out of this outfit, or be running it in less than ten years. Even then, Greg had known enough of Raman Çelik to recognize the statement as a compliment.

“I don’t need him to be receptive,” Elena said, turning away. “I just need him to stay still long enough for me to yell. And I want to do it while I’m still too exhausted to care if he yells back.”