Scavenger's Mission (The SkyRyders Book 1)

by Liza O'Connor

  When she got rid of her sand coating, he wrapped her in a towel and eased her down on the edge of the tub. Carefully working around her, he rinsed the sand from the tub and ran clean, hot water to which he added a salt solution mixed with antibiotics.

  He unwrapped the wet bandage on her knee and studied the wound now that he had better light. “There’s still a lot of debris inside. Let’s see how it looks after you soak for an hour.”

  “An hour?” She didn’t sound happy.

  “At a minimum,” he replied with extra sternness.

  “Will you stay with me?”

  He leaned over and helped ease her into the water. He raised the water level slightly to ensure even when partially bent the knee remained underwater. He also switched on the tub’s heating and circulation unit so the water circulated and foamed around her.

  “You have a hot tub.”

  “For medicinal reasons only. Comes in handy on days like today. Keep the knee close to the jet spray so it can wash out the remaining sand,” he instructed as he optimally positioned her knee.

  Once satisfied with her knee’s placement, he rolled a towel into a makeshift pillow and placed it behind her head.

  “I’ll be back to check on you in about a half hour,” he promised, and left the bathroom.

  He looked down at his wet, filthy suit. He could use a shower himself, but that would have to wait. First he needed to begin the interviews.

  He changed into a clean flysuit and went out in search of his squad. He found them huddled in their sleeping quarters, looking sullen and miserable.

  “Ollie, my quarters, now,” he ordered.

  Ollie looked like a deer caught in the headlights.

  “The crew is worn out from searching for the new recruit, sir,” DC said.

  Logan gave DC an icy glare, then looked at Ollie. “Now, Lieutenant!”

  Ollie climbed off his bed and followed Logan back to his room.

  Logan noticed that Ollie stared at the closed door of the bathroom, obviously concluding that Alisha must be inside.

  “She okay?” he asked.

  “Sit down,” Logan ordered, and positioned the camera to capture his face. “Roll up your sleeves and unzip your suit,” he ordered, attaching the bio-measure equipment to Ollie.

  “You’re giving me a lie detector test?” Ollie asked, his voice sounding unnaturally high.

  Logan ignored him and continued with the setup. When the computer program finally confirmed all the gear properly worked, Logan sat down. “Lieutenant Oliver Simpson, SR 980573925, you are formally notified that you are being questioned in an official inquiry established to determine the actions that occurred during and around the injury of flight trainee Alisha Kane. You are under command to tell the entire truth in this matter. You have been fitted with bio-measuring devices that will judge the veracity of your replies. Deviations from the absolute truth may result in immediate loss of rank and possible expulsion or court martial. Do you understand the penalties for lying under oath?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Soon into the interview, Logan determined that Ollie might have claimed he understood the penalty for lying, but that didn’t stop him from shading the truth to such a degree that the computer rejected his entire testimony as unreliable.

  Logan stared at the screen, trying to control his anger. Why the hell would Ollie ruin his career to protect DC? All he had to do was tell the truth and claim he’d followed orders. Even if he’d fired the gun, as long as he had been following his captain’s orders, he could have kept his current rank. Now that his file had been automatically forwarded to MAC, the Merit Assessment Computer, it would take a miracle for him to remain in the Corps.

  Logan quickly removed the bios.

  “That wasn’t so painful,” Ollie nervously joked. “Can I go back to my quarters now?”

  “Not just yet,” Logan said as he stared at the computer, waiting for MAC’s response. When it came, he read it, then printed a copy, signed it, and handed it to Ollie. “Oliver Simpson, the bio-measure analysis has determined your testimony to be unreliable. You are immediately stripped of your rank and reassigned as private third class. An appointment has been scheduled for you at the MAC lab on October fifteenth. If you fail to present yourself at that time, all rights and privileges will be revoked, and you will be classified as AWOL/code red. Do you understand the penalty if you fail to present yourself on the designated date?”

  Ollie turned ghost white. “This can’t be happening. DC said this wouldn’t happen.”

  “Private Simpson, do you understand the penalty if you fail to present yourself on October fifteenth?” Logan asked again.

  “I want to take the test again. You must have done something wrong.”

  “You will take the test again, Private, on October fifteenth at the MAC lab. And I won’t be giving it. So you’ve got one week to decide if you want to tell the truth and stay in the Corps, or lie and find yourself court martialed. You’re dismissed, Private. Tell Washington to come in next.”

  He knew he’d have a few minutes before Washington would show. In some ways, he was glad Ollie had chosen to lie and destroy his career. It set a clear example for the others not to follow.

  He knocked lightly on the bathroom door, then entered. Alisha was sound asleep. Or at least he thought she was asleep until he quietly dipped his hand in the water to make certain it wasn’t too hot. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  “Since you’re awake, let me see your knee,” he insisted, trying to take his mind off her beautiful smile.

  He examined her injury with a high-powered light and magnifying glass. “You’re very lucky. No damage to the kneecap or muscles. Shouldn’t be any long-term complications.”

  He heard a knock on the door to his rooms. He settled her knee beneath the water. “Try not to let yourself fall asleep. You might drown.”

  She smiled. “That would be really funny after the day I’ve had.”

  Logan didn’t return her smile. He didn’t think it would be funny at all.

  When he opened the door to the compound, an angry DC stood beside a terrified Washington.

  “Sir, if you have opened an official inquiry into today’s events, according to regulations, as captain, I should be running the investigation.”

  “You might want to reread your regs again, Captain. As commanding officer, I may take lead on any inquiry I deem necessary.”

  DC still didn’t back down. “I must officially object to your interference in my command again, sir.”

  “Object all you like, Captain. I trust you know the procedure as well as any soldier in the Corps.”

  “Regulations still allow me to be present during the interviews, sir.”

  “No, Captain. They certainly do not.”

  “Sir, Regulation 4.593 states—”

  Logan cut him off. “You obviously missed the exceptions to the reg. An officer will be excluded from any inquiry that may implicate said officer in possible infractions or misjudgments.”

  DC paused before replying but still looked as if he expected to win the argument. “I was under the impression this concerned the actions leading to the injury of Trainee Kane.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Then respectfully, sir, I must point out the regulations exempt you from opening the inquiry.”

  “How so, Captain?” Logan asked, truly amazed at DC’s objection. This bastard sure as hell didn’t back down.

  “Because, sir, it was you who recruited and placed into my squad an untrained and unlicensed flyer. The fact she came to harm during exercises today is solely your responsibility.”

  “Then you don’t consider your own actions in any way at fault?”

  “No, sir, I have a duty to my crew and the Corps not to lower the standards of training. To do so would endanger every man on my squad. I believe it better we weed out inferior trainees immediately. Just because you’re screwing her doesn’t make her a flyer. If you want to keep her
here as your whore, I’ll turn a blind eye. But I can’t let you place her on the squad, sir. She’s not fit. She proved that today.” Then he smiled.

  It took every bit of Logan’s control not to pound DC’s smirking face into the wall. He knew that was precisely what the bastard wanted. One blow, and an official inquiry would be started on him, and his own inquiry would be placed on hold until resolution of the new charge. And the hall camera would nail him as guilty.

  When he finally had control, he gave DC his coldest smile. “You no doubt meant to goad me with your absurd claim, but it won’t work.”

  Logan looked at Washington and nodded for him to step into his quarters. When DC attempted to follow, Logan closed the door hard against his face, then opened it again. “You should be more careful, Captain.”

  “You did that on purpose, sir!” DC cupped his hand over his nose.

  Logan could see blood trailing down through his fingers. “Nonsense. I had no reason to anticipate you would try to follow Washington into the room. I just made it clear you were not to be present during the interview.”

  “I’m going to report this.”

  “Of course—I would expect nothing less of you. But first, have Jersey take a look at your cut. That’s an order, Captain,” Logan added, and closed his door.

  He motioned for Washington to sit. “I hope you plan to be a little smarter than Private Simpson,” Logan said as he attached the bio measures to the young man. Washington didn’t answer, but he literally shook with fear.

  The computer cut the interview off after the third question. Logan stared in disgust at the message on the screen. Query abort. Subject exhibiting high-stress symptoms; possible coercion. Testimony unreliable. Data being sent to MAC.

  Logan’s teeth locked with anger. Had the damn program allowed him to continue, Washington would have broken and told the truth. The Ryder claimed he couldn’t remember much about the day, that losing the trainee at the end of the day had traumatized him, but he did recall her crashing a lot. No, he couldn’t recall exactly why she had crashed. With every answer, Logan edged him further into a corner, and Washington knew it. Pretty soon, he’d be forced to out-and-out lie or ’fess up and tell the truth.

  However, the program didn’t want a cornered confession. The symptoms were the same as those exhibited in coerced testimony, where outside the camera’s range, a wife or child might be held with a gun to their head while the interview proceeded.

  MAC soon responded with a date for assessment. Logan printed it off and read it to Washington in a similar procedure to Ollie’s. The only difference was that Washington wasn’t demoted. He still held his sergeant rank, since the computer could not determine if he’d lied or not.

  The interview with Jersey was the same.

  Logan had hoped for better with Philly, since the young man had already told him DC had tried to shoot Alisha. Unfortunately, the program never let him get to that question. It shut down for stress after less than a minute.

  When he read Philly his orders to report to MAC, the flyer nodded and apologized.

  “For what?”

  “You have no idea what this inquiry is like for us.”

  “Evidently not. I would think it would be simple. Tell the truth and get rid of your problem.”

  Philly whispered so softly, Logan could barely hear him. “But what if that doesn’t happen? What if the problem remains and now wants payback?”

  “You have to have faith in the system, soldier.”

  “The system doesn’t always protect a lowly flyer, sir. In this case, it may not even protect you.”

  “Are you threatening me, Philly?” Logan asked in surprise.

  “No, sir! I would never… I think the world of you. You’re everything a flyer should be. It’s my goal to be like you. I only meant there are some people who defy control and can twist situations to their own benefit.”

  “You have no reason to fear DC anymore, Philly.”

  “I want to believe you, sir, but…”

  “But what?” Logan prompted when Philly seemed reluctant to finish the sentence.

  Philly glanced at the bathroom door. “You weren’t even able to protect her, sir.”

  His comment made Logan angry. Not only had he failed to protect Alisha, but his entire crew believed a personal relationship existed between himself and Alisha, and worse yet: that he thought her far more important than any of them.

  “I can’t tell you what to believe, Philly, but understand this. My squad is very important to me, and as a member of my squad, Alisha Kane is important but no more so than you or Jersey or Ginnie. I’ll admit I’ve failed to protect all of you from DC. However, I had no idea what was going on until Alisha arrived. She’s the first of my crew to tell me the truth.”

  Philly grimaced at his words but held his ground. “She almost died for that, sir. The only thing that saved her was some incredible flying. If it had been me, I would have died on the first stall-out.”

  Logan sighed. “I get your point. And once we get this behind us, you’ll find I’m going to be far more involved in my crew, no matter how many complaints of interference my captain sends. But Philly, when you report to MAC, tell the absolute truth. It’s your only chance to get out from under this and get on with your career.”

  ***

  Ginnie’s interview was the shortest. She was sobbing from the moment she arrived for the interview. The program stopped the query after the first question. Logan just made certain she understood the penalty if she didn’t report in to MAC and let her go without further comment.

  In his entire career, he had never felt so completely disgusted with himself. He had let this bastard terrorize his squad for three years. There had to have been signs if he’d only looked.

  He sighed. He might as well have spent his days fishing the Cully for all the good he had done his squad.

  He shut down the interview program. Briefly looking over his emails, he saw MAC had also issued him an order to report for assessment, probably triggered by the stress levels of his squad. MAC, no doubt, wanted to know what the hell he was doing to the poor flyers.

  Nothing—that’s what he’d done for them—not a damn thing.

  He forgot to knock when he entered the bathroom to check on Alisha, but she didn’t complain. In fact, as he knelt down to check on her leg, she reached out and touched his cheek.

  “You look like hell.”

  “That from a girl who’s black and blue,” he muttered.

  “Actually, I feel pretty good now. Except I’m starting to prune up.”

  Logan gently tugged opened the gash on her knee and studied it under his laser light.

  “Are the interviews not going well?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “Well, you’ve looked gloomier every time you’ve come in to check on me, and now you look downright bleak.”

  Logan turned the mirror he was using to assess the wound onto his own face. “This is how I always look.”

  “No, there’s a difference. If you want to talk about it—”

  “If I had anything to talk about, I sure as hell wouldn’t be telling my problems to one of my crew.”

  Chapter 20

  Logan regretted his words. Had Alisha struck him in return, he wouldn’t have blamed her. He’d sent her out to die today. If she had the charity to care about his day after the one she’d just had, it didn’t give him a reason to bite her head off.

  Logan eased her leg back into the water, shut down the Jacuzzi, and opened the drain. When he reached down to help her out, she gave him a sulky glare.

  A well-deserved glare, Logan conceded. He sighed and knelt down so he faced her. “I’m sorry for being short. I’m about as angry with myself as I’ve ever been, but that’s no reason to bite your head off.”

  Alisha put her arms around his neck. For a moment he thought she was hugging him, but finally realized it was so he could lift her out of the tub. He placed his hands on each side of her
waist and raised her until she could stand on her good foot. He tried to step back, but Alisha held firm to his neck.

  “Why would you be angry at yourself?”

  All too aware of her beautiful naked body, he attempted to unclasp her arms from around his neck.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she insisted, resisting his tugging.

  Logan increased the pressure, finally breaking her grip and detaching her, being careful he didn’t cause her to lose her balance and fall. He handed her a towel, which, to his relief, she wrapped around herself.

  Once she was covered, he carried her to the bedroom and sat her on the bed’s edge. “I still need to give you an exam.”

  She removed the towel and lay down.

  The difference in her behavior from her first exam struck him hard. She had been so afraid back then, so certain he meant her harm. And now she trusted him. Despite the minor fact that he had sent her into harm’s way, she trusted him.

  His growing anger with himself helped him to focus during the exam. Every bruise, every indication of soreness added another notch to his anger. Fortunately, the only serious injury was to her knee. Alisha was remarkably unharmed for having dropped three hundred feet onto rocks.

  “Besides your knee, you look fine,” he assured her as he went to the computer and typed the results of his exam into her medical file.

  A few seconds after he saved the medical file, he received a query from MAC wanting to know why he had performed the exam instead of Medic Jersey Brown. Logan replied that his medic was possibly involved in the injury and referenced the official query he had opened. MAC responded immediately confirming Alisha’s flight test and psych exam tomorrow but changing it from voluntary to required.

  “Goddamn computer!” Logan cursed. “It just read your medical file. It should know you can’t take your flight exam tomorrow!”

  “I can do it,” Alisha assured him as she finished buttoning the top of his pajama top. She couldn’t wear the bottoms tonight because he didn’t want the cloth pressed against her knee. Fortunately, the top hung halfway down her thighs.