“You’ve been taking them for months.” Monica sounded stunned. “You’re an addict.”
“I’m not an addict,” Richard protested.
“That’s what Claire said,” Monica snapped. “She kept trying to tell us that, time and time again. She said she could quit any time she liked! And what happened? She just kept taking the pills, searching for that elusive high, until it was too late.”
“Stims are not drugs,” Richard said.
“No,” Monica agreed. “They don’t give you pleasure. But your body can become dependent on them ... your body has become dependent on them. That’s why we’re not supposed to take the bloody things for more than three days in a row. Didn’t you read the fucking warnings?”
Richard stalked over to the bed and sat down. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“Yes, you bloody did.” Monica softened her voice. “I know, it wasn’t a good time for you. It wasn’t a good time for any of us. But you can’t deal with a problem by medicating it into going away. It just gives you more problems.”
She paused, as if she was calculating something. “If you took one stim a day, ever since we left Earth ... you have to be utterly dependent on them by now. I’m surprised you held up as long as you did.”
“Thanks,” Richard said, sourly. “It hasn’t dulled my effectiveness.”
“You walked right past me,” Monica said. “You didn’t see me. I could have been stark naked and you would have walked right past me.”
Richard couldn’t help himself. He giggled. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve pretended not to see something.”
“Yeah.” Monica took a long breath. “There are lots of things we pretend not to see, aren’t there. The pilot who has a quick wank in his bunk, the pilot who needs to shit when there are no private bathrooms ... the tattoos and porn stashes and lots of other things that are technically against regulations, but don’t impede efficiency. And yes, the handful of pilots who wind up sleeping together. We turn a blind eye to them.”
She met his eyes. “I can’t turn a blind eye to this.”
“I know,” Richard said. “I would have reported myself if I hadn’t been needed.”
“There are six squadron leaders attached to this ship.” Monica didn’t sound convinced. He didn’t really blame her. “Any one of them could have taken over your duties, with one of their subordinates moving up to take over theirs. We do a shitload of cross-training just to make sure we have someone who can take over if their superior officer gets blown into stardust. You are not irreplaceable.”
“Now,” Richard said. He reached under the bed and found a bottle of water. “There wasn’t anyone who could take my place back then.”
“No,” Monica agreed. “But do you think it matters?”
She started to pace the tiny cabin, her arms swinging from side to side. “There have been pilots who took stims, who took them with authorisation and medical supervision and all the other little niceties you chose to ignore ... pilots who only took them for the recommended duration and still had problems afterwards. And you’ve been taking them for months!”
Richard took a long sip of water. It didn’t make him feel any better.
Monica swung around to face him, resting her hands on her hips. “It doesn’t matter how you took them,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what a Board of Inquiry has to say about it, if it thinks you were a victim of circumstance or someone who deserves to be banged up for the rest of his fucking life. What matters, right now, is that you are unfit for duty!”
“I can still function,” Richard protested.
“For how long?” Monica glared him into silence. “You were starting to zone out during the briefing, weren’t you? I know we’re all tired, and you’re not the only person who wants to sleep when he’s not in the cockpit, but ... what happens if you zone out during a fight? You might start shooting at us! Or simply crash into an asteroid and ...”
“I’ll have to be really out of it to crash into an asteroid,” Richard said. It sounded funny, even though he knew she was deadly serious. “And the IFF gear won’t let me shoot at friendly pilots ...”
“You trust that shit now?” Monica snorted, rudely. “You know as well as I do that IFF isn’t always reliable in the heat of battle. That’s why they tell us to make sure of our targets before we pull the trigger.”
She shook her head. “Richard, what were you thinking?”
“That I couldn’t go on without them,” Richard said, honestly. He knew he’d failed. He knew why he’d failed. But, even in hindsight, it was hard to imagine doing anything else. “I just couldn’t cope any longer.”
“I see,” Monica said. “And ... what now?”
Richard shrugged. Monica had a duty to report a superior officer who was unfit for duty. It wouldn’t be easy for her, he knew, and the inevitable Board of Inquiry would ask a number of pointed questions, but it was her duty. And yet, it might harm her career. Even if she wasn’t seen as a tattletale, even if he spoke out in her defence ... there were people who wouldn’t want her anywhere near them. A person who reported her senior officer for anything, even an open-and-shut case of corruption or abuse, wouldn’t endear herself to her future superiors.
Particularly if she didn’t report her suspicions at once, Richard thought, numbly. There was a point when a refusal to report something became complicity. He had a nasty feeling that Monica had already crossed that line. And if the inquiry reveals that she was sleeping with me ...
He felt his hand start to shake as he considered the possibilities. Monica should - technically - have reported her concerns as soon as she’d had them, even though a medical check-up might have revealed that she was overreacting. Might. But she hadn’t reported her concerns ... either out of misplaced loyalty or a simple awareness that, if she was wrong, she would blow her relationship with her commanding officer out of the water. Now ... if she reported him now, she would be asked why she hadn’t reported him sooner. And there would be no good answer she could give. An inquiry wouldn’t understand the realities of life on a starship. They wouldn’t realise that Monica had been caught between a rock and a hard place.
Damn them, he thought. Damn me.
He felt a stab of bitter guilt. The stim was already starting to wear off. The urge to inject himself again was almost overpowering, even though it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes since he’d taken the first stim. His body was already becoming dependent ... no, Monica was right. He was dependent on the stims. He was dangerously unfit for duty. He’d told himself that he could balance the stims, that he could use them without suffering any ill-effects, but he was wrong. He’d ruined his career and he was on the verge of ruining hers too.
“I will go to sickbay,” he said, slowly. He forced himself to stand on wobbly knees. “I will go to sickbay and report myself unfit for duty.”
Monica raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure you’ll go there?”
“Yeah.” Richard shrugged. “It’s the only way.”
He looked down at the deck, feeling another spasm of guilt. He’d tell the doctor that he’d been taking stims regularly and let her draw her own conclusions. If he was lucky, he’d either be relieved of duty and benched for the remainder of the deployment or simply sent home on the next convoy. He’d get a medical discharge and ... hopefully, no one would ever know that Monica had known. It might just save her career. He tried not to think about the other possibilities. He wasn’t sure he could live with himself if he destroyed her too.
And perhaps you should have thought about that before you started taking the stims, his conscience said. He felt knives of guilt piercing his heart. He’d failed in his duty. He was responsible for seventy-two pilots and he’d failed them all, both the ones who had died under his command and the ones who’d survived. You fucked up, son, and now someone else is going to suffer alongside you.
“They’ll send me home,” he said. “And you can take my place.”
Monica winc
ed. Richard didn’t blame her. The appointment was a poisoned chalice at the best of times. Now, if the truth came out, there would be people who would wonder if she’d deliberately sabotaged Richard’s career so she could take his job. It all depended, he supposed, on just how much of the story leaked out. Maybe it would be better to bring in someone new, someone utterly untainted by the scandal ... someone who wouldn’t know the pilots under his command. He laughed at himself, silently. The whole crisis had started because he’d known his pilots too well before they died.
He cursed himself under his breath. He remembered their names. He remembered their faces. Sometimes, late at night, he imagined that they were watching him from the great beyond. He’d been told that was one sign of a guilty conscience, but he hadn’t killed any of them personally. They’d merely died under his command. Perhaps they would have lived if someone else had been in command ...
It doesn’t matter, he told himself. They died. They will never marry, have kids, watch them grow up ...
He cleared his throat. “I don’t blame you,” he said. His career was over. He might as well do what he could to save hers. Perhaps that would make him look a little better, when the Board of Inquiry decided his fate. Even if it didn’t ... it was the right thing to do. He’d placed Monica in a horrible position. It was worth making things worse for himself if he made them better for her. “You did the right thing.”
“Did I?” Monica met his eyes. “I should have gone to the XO at once, shouldn’t I?”
Richard nodded, stiffly. “I’ll go now,” he said. “You go back to your squadron and try to look surprised when I’m relieved of duty.”
Monica gave him a sharp look, but turned and headed to the hatch without saying anything. Richard was almost relieved. What could she say? He’d made a string of mistakes, of bad choices, and now he had to pay for them. The only thing he could do was pray that she wasn’t dragged down too.
He watched the hatch close behind her, then reached for the packet of stims. The plastic felt heavy in his hand, as if the weight of the world rested in the tabs. He wanted - he needed - to inject himself once again, but ... gritting his teeth, ignoring the little voices that said he’d need them again, he walked into the washroom and dumped the packet into the waste disposal tube. A moment later, they were gone.
And I’ll be gone too, Richard thought, taking one last look around his cabin. He wouldn’t be seeing it again, one way or the other. His successor would take the cabin as well as everything else. I might not even be allowed to come back and pack.
He paused, fighting the insane urge to do nothing. No one liked confessing their sins, even if they were mistakes rather than outright crimes. He’d certainly never liked admitting his misdeeds at school ... and there, the consequences had been short and unpleasant rather than something that would blight the rest of his life. His lips twitched. None of his schoolmasters had ever been able to threaten his career. The nastiest punishment they’d been permitted to issue hadn’t lasted beyond the end of term.
Time to go, he told himself, firmly. There was no point in putting it off any longer. He owed it to Monica to get it over with as quickly as possible. It’s time to take it like a man.
And then the alarms began to howl.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Alice had been reviewing the data from Margo when her terminal bleeped.
It wasn’t something she had any special insight into, although she understood that one of the xenospecialists had speculated that she might have an unconscious awareness of how the virus thought ... assuming, of course, that it thought at all in any way a human might recognise. The virus was planning something, she was sure, but that belief came from her tactical training rather than anything more ... alien. It wasn’t as if the virus could afford to sit on its arse and let humanity built up the force necessary to challenge it. It needed to absorb as much of humanity’s territory as possible before it was too late.
She put the datapad aside and poked the terminal, wondering who’d contacted her. Major Parkinson and his subordinates were running a special exercise, one she’d been ordered to skip. Anyone else ... she couldn’t imagine anyone else who would deliberately seek out her company. She hadn’t had any real friends on the ship outside Marine Country, even before she’d been infected. Now ... she still didn’t have any real friends. She keyed the pad and blinked in surprise as the message popped up in front of her. It was her father. He was onboard Invincible.
“What the fuck?” Alice couldn’t believe it. “How the hell ...?”
She sat upright, her fingers dancing over the console. Her father couldn’t be on the ship, could he? It took her several moments, working her way through various databases, to work out that the master of Vanderveken - Captain Alan Campbell, formerly of the Royal Navy - had been invited onboard Invincible by Captain Shields. She felt a sudden stab of purely irrational betrayal - she knew it was irrational - as she probed the databases further, trying to determine why her father had been invited in the first place. A conference, apparently ... the databases weren’t any more informative. Her security clearance wasn't anything like high enough to find out what the conference was actually about.
“Damn him,” she muttered. It had been easy enough to ignore his messages requesting a meeting. No one was getting any shore leave, not when the entire system was bracing itself for an attack. There was no way she could have convinced Major Parkinson to let her take a trip to Vanderveken. But now ... Alice and her father were so close together that they were practically touching. It was a great deal harder to say no. “What now?”
She stared down at the terminal, barely seeing the words on the display. She could simply ignore the message. It would be easy enough. God knew she’d ignored the other messages from her father. But ... she wanted to see him, even though she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Hug him or kill him? Her father had been there for her, when she’d been a little girl; he’d put her on her first bike, he’d walked her to school, he’d ... he’d murdered her mother, damn him. She rested her head in her hands for a long moment. It would have been easier if all the memories had been bad. She could have declined the message and put the whole affair out of her mind.
If you go see him now, you might be disappointed, a voice said at the back of her mind. It sounded like Major Parkinson. But if you don’t go see him, you will always wonder what would have happened if you had.
Alice let out a sigh, then tapped a brief acknowledgement into the terminal. It wasn’t easy deciding where to meet. She didn’t want to bring her father into Marine Country, let alone her tiny cabin. But where could they go? The observation blister was out and there weren’t that many other places ... her lips curved as she made up her mind. It would be interesting to see if her father realised where he was going. Perhaps it would make the bastard a little uncomfortable.
She stood, brushed down her uniform and checked her sidearm. Perhaps it would be better to leave it behind ... Major Parkinson would chew her out for not carrying it, if he noticed, but she wasn’t sure she wanted the temptation. There was a part of her that wanted to shoot her father dead. And yet ... she told herself she was being silly. Her body was a weapon. She’d been trained to kill. She could hardly render herself harmless unless she donned shackles and ... snorting, she holstered her sidearm and headed for the hatch. She wanted to be there before her father. Let him come to her, rather than going to him.
The compartment was empty, she noted when she arrived. Technically, anyone who wanted to use the compartment had to book, but she’d heard through the grapevine that most crewmen didn’t bother. She’d never used one herself, not on Invincible. She opened the hatch, glanced into the washroom to make sure it was definitely empty, then sat down on the bed. There were no distractions in the compartment, not even a terminal. She had to smile at the thought. The people who came to the compartment made their own entertainment.
She took a deep breath, forcing herself to wait patiently. Something was
going to happen, but what? She could feel it. Boredom was good, she reminded herself; she knew she didn’t really believe it. It felt like hours before there was a knock on the hatch. Alice tapped the switch with her foot, opening it. Her father stood on the far side.
Alice stood, slowly. “Come in.”
Her father had been handsome, when he’d been a young man. Now ... he looked old, old and gray. He reminded her of some of the retired marines she’d met, during her training; men who kept themselves in shape, but were steadily losing the battle with time. Her father was healthy enough, she supposed, but he was showing traces of life in a low-gee environment. His eyes were still sharp, yet ... there was something about him that suggested he was struggling to keep himself together. But then, he had been through hell. Colchester, then the fires of the First Interstellar War, then being frozen ... he’d been lucky to survive. Alice was sure that sort of experience would leave a mark on anyone.
“Alice,” her father said. He sounded hesitant. She supposed that, to him, she’d aged twenty years in a second. “It is you, isn’t it?”
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