Читать книгу Remnants of Trust - Elizabeth Bonesteel - Страница 18

Jessica had expected the infirmary to be far more crowded. All of the beds in the main ward were taken, and most of the seats in the waiting area; but most of the wounded she could see were alert and talking quietly. She caught the eye of Redlaw, the head nurse, and he came closer so they could speak without being overheard.

“The casualty rate is pretty low,” he said. “Most of the losses were immediate, or shortly afterward. Çelik is the worst, although there are a couple of head injuries I’m keeping an eye on.” He frowned at her. “You look like hell.”

“So I’ve been told.” She relented enough to give him a smile; all she’d had to face was a dead ship’s core. “I’m sorry, Fran. This being in charge shit doesn’t suit me all that well.”

“Today isn’t suiting anyone well, Commander,” he said, and she remembered why she liked him. “You’re on your feet? You’re doing fine.”

She moved slowly through the ward on her way to the private room at the end. Some of the soldiers were dozing—on their own or with assistance she could not tell—but most were sitting up, surrounded by people from both Exeter and Galileo. Despite the chatter, there was a stillness to the room, a hushed heaviness that clung to her skin like sweat. Jessica always hated the aftermath of tragedy. It involved far too much paralysis.

It reminded her far too much of home.

She headed for Doctor Hastings, who was studying a readout at his desk at the end of the ward. Beyond him, she could see the open door of the private room where Captain Çelik was staying. A small, cowardly part of herself was hoping he would be asleep.

“Is he up?” she asked Bob.

“He’s been up for three hours,” Bob replied, his expression sour. “He’s clobbering the hell out of that new leg.”

“Can’t you stop him?”

“Is that a joke?”

Jessica stole a surreptitious look through the door of the private room. Çelik was walking around the bed—slowly—testing his balance on the artificial leg. Jessica had never seen a metal prosthetic before—grafts were much more common these days, although they took time—and she found herself impressed at how well he was doing with it. His gait was slow and uneven, and he seemed to test the odd, spidery, six-toed foot every time he set it down; but he made repeated circuits around the bed without hanging on to anything. He would never be graceful on it, but he would be able to move. She couldn’t think of more than one or two officers who would be so tenacious and disciplined in this situation, and one of them she was already serving under.

What the fuck is wrong with the Admiralty, that they’d retire the man over this?

She swallowed her anger. None of this was her call, and feeling righteous wrath on his behalf wasn’t going to make what she had to tell him any easier.

Jessica stepped forward into the doorway and stood at attention, waiting. Çelik, who had certainly seen her, did not alter his careful path across the floor. She felt a moment’s uncertainty—should she wait for him to speak first?—before remembering her still-unfamiliar rank. “Captain Çelik,” she said politely, “I have a report on what happened to your ship during the attack.”

His eyes shot into hers, although he did not stop walking. “As I was there, Commander Lockwood, I’m pretty sure I don’t need your report.”

Oh, the rage that came with that look. She found it comforting, after a fashion. If he was angry, that meant he was likely to be still thinking, at least enough to help her out. “I’m referring to Exeter’s lack of defense,” she clarified, never doubting he’d known what she meant.

He looked away from her again. She would have thought he would be watching his feet, but instead he stared straight ahead, gaze unfocused. “Do you know what the worst of it is?” he asked incongruously. “It’s slow. I feel the pain in the stump where it’s attached before I get the feedback from the foot and the ankle. It’s not my balance that’s the problem. It’s my brain trying to decode nonsense.”

She took his change of subject as tacit agreement to hear her report. “Your gunner isn’t culpable, sir,” she said. “Your targeting systems were taken out before the attack, probably at least sixteen hours earlier.”

“Wasn’t.”

“Sir?”

“My gunner wasn’t culpable. He’s dead.” His tone was icy, derisive.

He’s angry with me. Jessica, who had a closer acquaintance with death than most of her crewmates, absorbed his fury without complaint. “Wasn’t, sir,” she corrected herself.

Stomp, clank. Jessica wondered if they couldn’t make something a bit less robotic, even for a temporary. Çelik had enough oddness to deal with. “Why isn’t your time frame more precise?” he asked.

“Parts of the core were damaged, sir.”

“Any suspects?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Weapons are under command codes, sir, but not priority ones. They’re not that hard to crack.”

Another look, although this one was more calculating than angry. “Not for you,” he said. “For the average Corps grunt?”

“Your people all have excellent reputations, sir, including the infantry. But if you’re assuming someone figured it out on their own, then … no, sir, not for the average Corps grunt. Although I imagine most of your cyber people could have done it.”

Stomp, clank. “You’re saying it requires knowledge, but not skill.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which doesn’t eliminate anyone.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then, the information isn’t actually helpful, is it?”

“I don’t agree, sir.”

That stopped him. He turned to face her down, and she looked up at him, careful not to react. Jessica was short, and most people made her feel tiny. But Çelik—wide and glowering and angry—made her feel like an insect. He had a reputation for being ill-tempered and intimidating, and Jessica was discovering it was not exaggerated. What was interesting was how deliberate it was, how much of what he was doing to her was designed to get her to respond. He was, in a way, the diametric opposite of her own captain. Greg turned everything inside, measuring and calculating before he moved. Çelik targeted everyone with laser-precise shots, daring them to react to him.

Jessica was used to people thinking they could intimidate her by making her feel small. It had never worked.

“How long have you been second-in-command of this ship, Commander?” he asked her.

“Eight months, sir.” Eight long, bureaucracy-filled months—too many of them spent worrying that Greg was going to get demoted … or fired. He’d given her the job because he knew she could run the ship in his absence.

Never mind if I wanted to do it.

“And exactly how is it you feel entitled to tell me you know what the hell you’re doing?”

Well, it was hardly surprising she had struck a nerve. “Because I do, sir. I was hacking computer cores long before I hit command. Are we going to keep arguing about this, sir, or are we going to discuss what we’re going to do about it?”

He straightened a little, and she took a breath, realizing she had frozen under his looming gaze. “How’s your security?” he asked her.

“On alert,” she told him. Greg had ordered the heightened security before they started taking on Exeter’s crew—even before she had proof that the battle had been anything other than one starship overwhelmed by numbers. They had people monitoring all of the strangers, but Jessica would feel better after they offloaded them to Cassia.

And how much do I hate myself for suspecting my fellow soldiers? She had mistrusted Greg’s previous second-in-command, and with good reason, but suspicion always made her feel angry and irritable.

Çelik was looking away from her, frowning. That, at least, was a look she knew: Greg had it sometimes, when he had absorbed everything he could and was sorting through it in his head. “I need to speak to them,” he said abruptly, “and then I’ll talk with Foster.” He focused on her again. “Where are the rest of my people?”

She escorted Çelik to the pub, reflecting that his slowed-down pace was just about perfect for her relatively short legs. Bob had shoved a cane into his hands, which he carried in one fist like a spear. The crew members they passed tended to give him first a look, then a wide berth. Jessica wanted to laugh at them. Their own captain had been known to tear furiously through the corridors, although lately he had been working to do less of that; but the studied scowl of Captain Çelik was far more alarming than anything Greg ever expressed publicly.

Çelik must have caught her look, because he slowed his pace a little and tried to arrange his features into something less horrifying. “How long have you served on Galileo, Commander?”

If he had read anything about her at all, he would know. “Almost seven years, sir.”

“Did you want the job?”

“Yes, sir. I beat out sixteen people for it.”

She felt him glance at her. “Selection is blind, Commander. You couldn’t have known how many you were competing with.”

Shows what you know, she thought. “Given my background, sir, I think you’ll find you’re mistaken.”

“So you cheated.”

“No, sir.”

“You broke the law.”

That was closer. “Technically, sir, yes.”

“And Foster hired you anyway?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even knowing you could have fabricated your own history.”

Greg had offered her the position, and after her enthusiastic acceptance, he had taken the discussion off the record and told her that if he ever caught her falsifying records or using privileged information for fraudulent reasons, he’d have her thrown in jail. Youth and inexperience had made her more angry than frightened. I don’t need to fake my talents, sir, she had told him stiffly.

He had laughed.

“Captain Foster is almost as good as I am, sir,” she said. “He would have known if I’d hacked the records.”

“You have a strange sense of ethics, Commander. I could have used someone like you on Exeter.”

Jessica absorbed the odd sensation of being complimented and insulted at the same time.

There was too much ambient noise in the pub for the sound of Çelik’s artificial foot to be detected, but she was surprised it took so long for people to feel his presence. He filled the doorway, and as she stood to one side of him, she felt him change: he straightened, and all of the rage and frustration he had been radiating turned to calm confidence. She felt the hair on the back of her neck go up as the room slowly fell silent. He stood still for a moment, then walked past her to approach the bar, effortlessly becoming the center of gravity in the room. That, she thought, is not a thing you learn. It’s a thing you are.

Çelik stood steadily on both feet, one real, one artificial, hands behind his back closed over the cane. His eyes moved from face to face, one at a time; she could see in their reactions that they felt the personal touch. “I’m glad,” he said, his voice carrying effortlessly through the big room, “to see all of you.

“And I know you, like me, are thinking of our comrades who are not with us. Who were lost in this act of war against our ship, against our government. They fought with bravery and strength, as we all did. Every one of us. Why they were lost and we were not—” He broke off, and his next words were quieter. “There is no answer to that question. But I will tell you this: every one of you must take pride in how you responded today. Every one of you stood up, and did your duty, and so much more. I am proud to have been your captain today, as I am every other day. And I am humbled, constantly, by your focus, your talent, your dedication.

“We fought together. We fought bravely. We fought with strength and courage. We lost comrades, and that is a tragedy we cannot reverse. But we have not lost this war. Thanks to our allies aboard Orunmila and Galileo, we will find the enemy. We will thwart their plans. We will ensure that they will never again attack a Corps starship, that we will lose no more of our people. They will understand—completely and irrevocably—what fools they were today. What they have taken from us we will take from them a hundredfold. Why? Because we are strong. We are united. And we will not fail.”

Cacophony followed this speech as he was rushed by his crew, clapped on the shoulder, offered drinks, salutes, and handshakes. None of them, Jessica noted, seemed to register his prosthetic at all. For her part she hung in the corner, away from the throng, aware of an atmosphere that was close to hysteria. It had been a rousing speech, hitting all the right notes of nationalism and revenge.

She might have fallen for it herself had she not just spent ten minutes explaining to him that he probably had a traitor in his crew.

Without a word to anyone, Jessica slipped out the door and left him to his subterfuge.