Unfortunately, he'd missed her on the line. The processing line had had at least the advantage of not being anywhere near the core of Guy's operations. The same couldn't be said of the Sand Piper.
Guy felt like he was being herded, and he didn't like it. If he hadn't known Yuri Tretyak so well as a person it would have been a conviction not a feeling. The Ping thing could have been happenstance. That's what he'd figured. Stuff happened. You coped and overcame.
Kincaid had been dangled in front of him on the processing line like so much bait. It rankled that he'd fallen into the trap and not got the bait both. Still, it could have been coincidence.
That the next place the Commander sent the poor girl was the Sand Piper was starting to look like enemy action.
Guy had a hard time thinking the Commander was so clever and such a great actor. He had an even harder time thinking that he'd be willing to use the Kincaid girl in such a ruthless and cynical manner. Only the evidence for it was piling up.
In any event, clueless clown or ruthless schemer Guy had a counter for the Commander.
Guy had no hope that the girl would fail to notice the smuggling the Sand Piper's crew were engaged in. Even less hope that she'd keep it under her hat like any more sensible and less principled person would. You could place money on that bet if you could find anyone dumb enough to take it.
What he could do, what he was going to do, was make sure that the inevitable accusation when it came backfired.
That done and the Commander would have to either reveal himself as not on the level or he'd have to sacrifice Kincaid.
If the Commander chose to blow his cover, then Guy would arrange for his removal. An accident would be too suspicious, but his long overdue promotion back to a post on the far side of Luna maybe not so much. Guy would enjoy congratulating him on it. It'd be tempting to hint it was because of strings Guy had pulled with friends back in-system. He'd resist that temptation.
On the other hand, if the Commander acted in character with what he'd shown so far Kincaid wouldn't be dead, but she'd be so disgraced she might as well be.
In either case, nobody would be making wild accusations about the Sand Piper and her crew again any time soon.
And Guy's plans would proceed apace.
He'd be not only rich, but powerful locally, and influential system-wide.
Guy smiled at the Commander.
"Does sound good, Yuri," he said.
* * *
Katie had always enjoyed good health. Something she now realized she'd never appreciated as much as she should have. Her ongoing belly ache told her that. It wasn't any bug. It was worry and stress straight out.
Well, at least it was almost over.
She was with the rest of the crew on the bridge for the docking approach to Ceres. Normally she'd have happy to have been there. She'd done this dozens of times, up into the hundreds for her whole life, on the Dawn Threader, but only rarely on other ships and never before on a Space Force one.
It was an adventure and a chance to learn all rolled into one.
But all she could think about was the message queued up to go once the Sand Piper had docked.
The one addressed to Commander Tretyak with the greatest urgency.
She'd debated sending the message to Chief Dingle as well, or maybe just to him. She didn't know how far up the rot in the Space Force went.
She also didn't know much about the Police Chief.
Commander Tretyak for all his flaws she'd seen quite a bit of. He gave every indication of being on the level despite being somewhat hide bound in his thinking. Also, it made no sense for him to have sent her out on the Sand Piper if he'd known the crew was involved in smuggling. He was her best bet.
Her message had asked he come down to the docks right away. That he institute immediate and full surveillance of the docks before doing so.
She didn't think there was anything she could say to the man that'd convince him one of his crews was involved in smuggling.
He'd need to see hard evidence for himself.
She'd need to lead him to those cargo bins and show him the alien tech before the smugglers managed to move it.
That should do the job.
The fecal matter would surely and truly meet the air impeller at that point.
All she could do was not too much of it would get splattered on her.
She had to think people were right.
She was a trouble magnet.
* * *
It was a grim parade that Katie was leading.
The Commander, Captain Anderson, and a couple of MPs.
The Commander had brought a whole five man squad of MPs with him to greet the Sand Piper on her arrival home. He'd left the sergeant in charge of it with the other two MPs back on the docks outside of the Sand Piper's airlock, along with the remainder of the Scout Courier's crew.
Katie had had to march past them on their way into the ship. They'd been lined up at parade rest. Katie wondered that such blank faces could look so unhappy. They'd pointedly avoided looking right at her. She'd become a non-person.
She'd never felt so bad about doing the right thing. Wasn't sure she'd ever felt so bad. Didn't add up. Some regrets she could see. But she was doing the right thing. They were smugglers. The Space Force had been infiltrated and subverted. It could not stand. She wished fervently it could have been someone else doing the fixing. All she felt was awful. No satisfaction. No sense of victory. No pride in a job done well.
At least as grim and somber as they were, the Commander, and the MPs didn't have invisible waves of disappointed condemnation rolling off them and all over Katie's raw nerves.
She'd be ever so happy when this was over with.
The short trip through the Sand Piper's air lock and aft to the cargo section felt like forever.
Nobody spoke.
Once they were all assembled in the now small feeling space, Katie pointed. "That bin there, those there, and there," she said. "They're the only ones I looked in. They had alien tech in alien cargo containers. Data pads and data shards. Probably some of the other bins, too."
The Commander motioned an MP to open the first bin Katie had indicated.
It was empty.
The others all glanced at each other.
The Commander had the MP open all the other bins.
They were all empty too.
"We're done here," the Commander said flatly.
An MP took Katie by the arm.
10: Katie on the Carpet
They were alone. In the Commander’s office. They’d left a pair of MPs on guard outside.
Katie was standing at some civilian semblance of attention in front of the Commander’s desk. He’d not offered her a seat, and she knew enough not to take one.
The Commander had managed to maintain his dignity and the appearance of calm until the door had closed behind the MPs. He’d then sat himself down in his chair, anger apparent in every line of his body. Currently, he had his elbows on his desk and his forehead resting on his clasped hands. Even if Katie hadn’t been able to see his complexion was flushed dark red, she’d have known he was furious.
That he was trying to compose himself before speaking.
Katie couldn’t help thinking that if less than an hour ago she’d deleted the message she’d instead, in the end, sent him, she’d be seeing a very different version of the Commander now. A happy, congratulatory one. She’d heard the universe wasn’t fair. She was beginning to believe it.
As it was she’d done the right thing, but she now had no idea how she could prove she wasn’t in fact a brazen self-aggrandizing liar. If she was anyone else looking in from the outside, that’s what she’d believe herself.
As things stood, she wouldn’t give herself another chance to win an endorsement to the Academy. Yet she had to convince the Commander that’s what he should do.
So she had a goal. Only no idea of how to achieve it.
In the time she’d spent pondering how hop
eless her situation was, the Commander settled down. His complexion returned to only a little more florid than normal. His breathing settled into a more regular, slower pattern.
The man had been mad. He looked up from his hunched up over posture and grimacing, took a deep breath. He sat up straight and inspected her coldly. He did not seem pleased with what he saw.
“Sir?”
“You will be quiet and listen to me,” the Commander said, his tone implacable and harsh.
“Yes, sir.”
One of the Commander’s eyes twitched. “I don’t know what to think of you, Miss Kincaid,” he said, “up to this point you always seemed to be in trouble, but it never appeared to be your fault.”
The Commander paused. Katie resisted the urge to fill the silence with affirmations of her innocence. The Commander didn’t give the impression of someone who wanted to hear it. He’d said as much, hadn’t he?
“A couple of hours ago I had every hope I’d be giving you endorsement to the Academy,” he said. “The preliminary reports from Captain Anderson were very positive. It would have given me great pleasure to have been able to have done that. And you blew it with your ridiculous accusations against the Sand Piper’s crew. Against people who’d shown you nothing but the greatest consideration, as far as I can tell. You’ve gone too far this time.”
“Sir,” Katie replied in haste, trying to get her protest in before he could shut her down. “That’s it, isn’t it? Whatever else you think of me you don’t think I’m stupid, right?”
“No,” the Commander answered with a quick shake of his head, “make this quick. You’ve wasted enough of my time.”
“So why would I do something so stupid and self destructive? I’m not a liar, sir,” Katie said. She couldn’t keep a degree of heat out of her voice. She prided herself on facing reality head on and not lying about it. “The lie would have been conveniently ignoring what I saw. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I would have gotten everything I wanted. Blowing the whistle on the others, I didn’t want to do that. They’re not bad people, whatever they’re wrapped up in. Something this ugly makes everyone look bad. There was no upside for me.” The Commander started to fidget. Katie wanted to bludgeon him with words until he saw things her way. She knew she had to give it up. “Why would I tell such a stupid lie that was bound to hurt me as well as everyone else?”
The Commander sighed slightly. He was regaining control of himself. He leaned back in his chair. Thinking. Katie could tell he could see the logic of her words. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s rather a lot I don’t know. I’m no psychologist. I have learned over the years that people follow their hearts and their brains follow making up rationalizations. It could be these messes you get into are cries for attention. Attention your parents have neglected to pay you. They are somewhat self-involved, you have to admit. Perhaps because of that you haven’t felt as loved as you could have. It might be that you don’t feel you deserve the success your abilities allow you. Perhaps you sabotage yourself because of that.”
“I think I’d know if that was true, sir,” Katie said. “I’m not so silly.”
The Commander smiled thinly and without humor. “And there you show how young you are. I say again; our brains follow our hearts. We’re the first people we lie to.”
“Seems a rather romantic notion, sir,” Katie said. She kept most of an acidic edge out of her voice. It seemed a grandiose and unlikely statement, and she failed to see how he could believe it. How he could have come to the conclusion in the first place. Worse, this odd notion was threatening her future.
“It’s called experience, Miss Kincaid,” the Commander replied. “To be specific and concrete since you seem to like that, I’m not quite as stupid as many of you appear to think I am.”
“I’m not one of those people, sir,” Katie hastened to say.
“Thank you, Miss Kincaid,” the Commander replied dryly, “I appreciate the endorsement.”
Katie winced at the word endorsement, though she doubted the Commander had used it with malicious intent.
“In any event a fondness for keeping things simple and routine doesn’t make me stupid or unobservant,” the Commander went on, “I’m fairly intelligent and when I attended the Academy I had the pleasure of meeting some of the smartest people alive.”
“Yes, sir,” Katie said. She was eager to hear this.
The Commander gave another grimace in lieu of a smile. No, he wasn’t unobservant. “Invariably no matter how perceptive an individual normally was or how skilled at logic, they made their decisions based on what they wanted emotionally. The real thinking came later in the rationalization and implementation stages. Some of the most successful cadets simply skipped the supposed analysis and jumped right to those stages. It was frankly rather disturbing how well that worked.”
“You’re naturally cautious, sir,” Katie observed.
The Commander’s expression showed a little genuine humor this time. “If you were more so, you’d have kept that thought to yourself,” he said. “Someone more egotistical may have been offended and you’re already in my bad books.”
“Sir.”
“Anyhow, people believe and think what they want to. The really smart ones come up with better rationalizations. So it’s not far fetched to think you’ve may have done something stupid and self sabotaging for emotional reasons without being aware of it yourself. I think so and so will many other people with a few more years under their belts.”
“I see, sir,” Katie replied. Though if she was honest it was not that clear to her. She could follow the logic given his premises, which he claimed to base on personal experience. If she wanted to convince him of anything, she did need to understand his point of view.
“So, do you have anything else to say for yourself?”
“Sir, accusing the Sand Piper’s crew of smuggling was really going to hurt them,” she said.
“Go on,” the Commander grunted.
“I mean at the very best even the possibility they’re smugglers hurts their careers and if proven they’d be fined at least. At worst, they could be drummed out of the Space Force and spend years in prison.”
“And yet you did accuse them.”
Katie gulped. She hadn’t liked this from the beginning, and she still didn’t. “I did, sir,” she said, “knowing how bad it could hurt them despite rather liking them all from our short acquaintance. Sir, say what you will but I don’t have record of wanting to hurt people, do I?”
“Billy Boucher?”
“Sir, I can’t prove it, but Billy Boucher and his gang were bullies, but they’ve graduated to really hurting people,” Katie said. “They’re criminals. They like to hurt people and they enjoy profiting from it. If Billy wasn’t Guy Boucher’s son you’d all see that.”
“I think the key point there,” the Commander said, “is that you can’t prove that. Those are yet another set of very serious accusations.”
“Yet they’re true and a lot of people on this rock know it too.”
“You’re not helping yourself with this line of attack.”
“Objectively, sir, I have no history of doing things that’ll hurt other people. I think Miss Ping’s report and the ones you got from my supervisors on the line all back that up, right?”
The Commander nodded noncommittally.
“Anyhow, leaving my character aside, there’s something wrong going on here that’s not my fault,” she said, “and the proof is someone trying to kill me on the line.” There he couldn’t deny that fact or that logic.
“Miss Kincaid, it could be argued you have shown a profound and consistent indifference to the effect of your actions on other people, even if up to this point you’ve failed to be actively malicious,” the Commander said.
Katie colored. She thought it was unfair, but it was hard to argue with a perception.
“Regards the incident on the line, whatever happened it failed to kill you and did kill Johnny Applebaum,”
the Commander continued grimly, “It could be hypothesized that you staged that attack yourself to attract attention and confuse matters. That indeed you’re guilty of Johnny Applebaum’s murder, deliberately or otherwise.”
It took Katie a second to absorb what the Commander had said. “You can’t believe that!” she burst out.
“Don’t tell me what I can or can’t believe, Miss Kincaid,” the Commander replied. “I could, but as it happens I’m not inclined to. I don’t think you’re that good of an actress or that self deluded from what I’ve seen of you. The fact remains that the argument could be made. Your logical position is not as good as you’d like to think it is.”
“So what do you think, sir?” she asked.
“I’m uncertain of what to think,” the Commander said. “I do believe I’ve tried to give you a fair chance to prove yourself a worthy Space Force Academy candidate. What has resulted is a series of messes. It’s been said you tell the tree by the fruit it bears. Seems like a good rule of thumb.”
“I see, sir,” Katie replied. She did too, and it didn’t look good.
“Right now,” the Commander went on, “I couldn’t do much for you if I wanted to. Publicly accusing a crew of smuggling and then failing to substantiate the charges is that serious. I can’t endorse you now. I can’t even afford to indulge you further.”
“That bad?”
“That bad,” the Commander replied. “You’re lucky it’s not worse. If you weren’t still a minor you’d be looking at charges and likely a few years in a prison somewhere. It’s that bad. So you don’t get my endorsement. I don’t want to have you darkening my doorstep again. Clear?”
“Clear, sir.” Katie was shocked by what he’d said. She couldn’t see how she could dig her way out of this.
“Furthermore, I don’t have the power to confine you to your quarters, but I suggest you stay in them as much as possible until your parents return with your ship. I suggest you board her and then stay off of Ceres in the future. You’re not welcome here.”
Katie Kincaid Candidate: Katie Kincaid One Page 14