by Terry Mixon
“The pirates came onto the station at several points. Almost all of them moved to secure critical infrastructure like Security Central, Central Power, and life support. But not all.
“One group seems to have gone rogue. They headed straight for Ringbolt Associates. SaturCorp is the major company here on Blackhawk Station, but not the only one. Ringbolt is the only other big one, though.”
“What do they do?” he asked, savoring another sip of coffee.
“In general, they provide cutting-edge technology. Their staff has some of the brightest engineers and scientists when it comes to the extraction and refining of materials from gas giants.”
Her face soured. “Had, I should say. We’re still sorting out the damage, but it certainly looks as if the pirates killed everyone in the offices and workshops. Of course, with the general chaos we’re experiencing, that might not be completely true. I have people looking for survivors as we speak.”
Brad considered that. How could it play into his theory? Or was it simply a distraction? Rogue pirates looting to fill their pockets?
“What shape are the offices in now?” he eventually asked.
“Rough,” she admitted. “It’s hard to tell if they took anything or simply wrecked the place.”
“Did they wreck any other section of the station?”
“Not like that.”
Brad nodded thoughtfully. “That certainly sounds like an intentional act, then. Any word on what Ringbolt Associates might have been working on? I assume they supplied SaturCorp.”
“They did, but not exclusively. They also worked with our biggest rival, JoveCorp. And a number of smaller outfits looking to break into the business, of course.”
“Is that difficult? Breaking into the gas extraction and refining business.”
Simon shrugged. “It must be. No one else has managed to turn a profit yet. New groups try every few years, but they go out of business because they have no infrastructure and their pockets are too shallow.”
A tap at the door drew their attention. A dark-skinned man in a security uniform inclined his head as he leaned in. “Sorry for the interruption, but we found someone from Ringbolt Associates in the medical center. Svetlana Garrow. Some kind of research scientist.”
“What’s her condition?” Simon asked.
“Physically, she’s fine. She was off shift when the attack happened, and we found her helping to move the wounded from elsewhere in the station. Emotionally, she’s a wreck. She just found out everyone she’s worked with for years is dead.”
Brad rose to his feet, setting the mug on the edge of the desk. “I think we’d best go talk to her.”
The medical center was worse than Brad had expected. Even with all the help from the Fleet cruisers, the medical teams were still overwhelmed.
Injured people overflowed the working areas and filled the surrounding corridors. It only took a glance to tell that some of the people desperately awaiting care wouldn’t make it.
Their wounds sickened him. They’d been shot, cut, and burned. The injuries seemed to show the pirates vying to outdo one another in cruelty. The Cadre had so much to pay for.
They found Svetlana Garrow moving an injured woman to the line of stretchers awaiting surgery. The tall, swarthy woman was crying. From her stricken expression, she hadn’t adjusted well to the news that all her friends and coworkers were dead. Of course not.
He made a mental note that to spend more time with his people, especially Saburo and Trista. The two combat specialists hadn’t shown this level of grief, but it had to be buried inside them. He just hadn’t seen it because he’d been suffering with his own grief.
“Miss Garrow?” Simon asked gently. “We need you to come with us.”
The woman blinked at the security officer, seeing their group for the first time. “I’m busy,” she said harshly. “I told your people what I know. Leave me alone so that I can help someone. Anyone.”
“You’re not helping them like this,” Brad said softly. “Your pain is affecting them. Come away with us for now.”
It was obvious to him that the people near her were interpreting her anguish as an indicator of their own prognosis. She was terrifying people who were already in dire straits.
Simon lightly took the other woman’s arm, pulled her out into the corridor and away from the medical center. Garrow didn’t resist. In fact, her removal from the medical center seemed to break her. She cried with great, gasping sobs and had to be led to a nearby room.
The security chief sat the woman down and found tissues for her. She glanced at Brad and then at the door, so he took the hint and stepped outside.
“Trista?” he asked, focusing his attention on his officer. “How are you feeling?”
Her face was ashen and filled with rage.
“Like I want to kill someone,” she ground out, wiping away a tear. “I feel just as bad as that woman. Just as lost. Only, I have an outlet for my pain through violence.”
He nodded. “I think I need to find someone for us all to talk to. We’d been lucky until now. We’d never lost a person. Today, the universe took its due by taking almost everyone on the combat team and our executive officer. Not one of us is going to be okay for a while.”
“I don’t want to be babied, sir. I can manage.”
He shook his head, disagreeing sharply with her assessment. “Before I became a mercenary, I lost everyone I cared about. I know how badly that rage can twist you into a person you wouldn’t recognize. I almost gave it power over me before I figured out how to make it serve my ends.
“I’m not going to give you some kind of pap about making it go away. The pain never goes away. It only lessens with time. And getting a grip on how to focus your vengeance will make your life worth living again. Trust me on that.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s why you named our ship Heart of Vengeance? Because the Cadre took everything from you?”
“I don’t advertise it, but with a Cadre bounty on my head, I suppose it’s not much of a secret anymore. Yes. Back when I had a different name, the Terror killed my family and the woman I loved. I swore to make him pay.”
“And now he has Captain Hunt and he’s killed so many of our people,” she said sadly. “Maybe you need to talk to someone, too.”
“I will,” Brad promised. To himself as much as to Trista. It was too easy a mistake to make. “I’ve learned my lesson. Still, that previous loss taught me what I needed to do to keep the rage from eating me up. Rather, it did once I talked to someone that could help me. We’ll get someone to help us through this so we can enjoy our revenge when it’s done.”
The young security officer that had been managing Central’s office hurried around the corner with a box in his arms. He brightened at seeing the group in the corridor and lengthened his stride.
“Commodore Madrid,” he said with a smile. “I’m glad I found you. A Fleet officer brought this for you from Commodore Wilson.”
Brad couldn’t imagine what it could be, but he’d best take a look.
That’s when he saw the man peering around the same corner the troop had just turned. His furtiveness set off alarm bells inside Brad’s hindbrain.
“Stop!” Brad shouted and began backpedaling. “Everyone back!”
Trista spun him around and interposed her body between him and the man just as the world ended.
Chapter Fifteen
Brad opened his eyes to a dimly lit room with a white ceiling. It wasn’t one he was familiar with, but he recognized the theme. He was quite familiar with infirmaries of various kinds by this point. It wasn’t the medical center on Blackhawk, Goliath, or Heart of Vengeance, though.
He struggled for a long moment to remember how he’d gotten there. Then the explosion came back to him.
Trista.
Brad fumbled a bit but managed to find the call button with his good hand. A nurse—a strapping young man with long black hair and a hooked nose—appeared.
“You’re awake
,” the man needlessly observed. “You’re safe.”
“Trista Doary,” Brad said in a rusty-sounding voice. “She was with me. Is she okay?”
“She’s alive and receiving treatment,” the man said, his voice pitched into a soothing lower tone. “Let me summon the doctor so she can answer your questions.”
Brad wanted to shake the answers he desperately needed from the man, but he knew arguing would get him nowhere. Medical types were all the same. They never wanted to tread on their peers’ toes.
A few minutes later, footsteps sounded in the corridor as someone approached at a brisk pace. The footfalls turned out to belong to an attractive auburn-haired woman shrouded in a white lab coat.
Brad grabbed hold of the bed’s rail with his good hand and pulled himself into a partially upright position so he could see her better.
“Good evening, Commodore Madrid,” she said as she checked a computer readout next to the bed. “Let me tilt the bed up a bit so that you don’t have to spend your limited strength looking at me. How do you feel?”
“Like I should be dead.” His throat felt like a pounce of cats had used it as a litter box.
“You were never quite in danger of that, but I can understand the feeling,” she said sympathetically. “You’ve had a lot of trauma between the original severance of the arm, the gunshot, the effects of those horrid patches, a wide-spectrum stimulant that some mental defective gave you, and the blast damage.
“That last is what convinced Blackhawk Station’s chief medical officer to place you in a medically induced coma until you were in a position to receive appropriate treatment. An excellent call to follow up on the earlier shortcomings.”
“So, I’m not on Blackhawk?”
“Obviously not. You’ve been unconscious for six days and your crew has brought you to Serenade Station in the leading Jovian trojan cluster. I’m Dr. Gina Duvall.”
Brad had heard of Serenade Station from…somewhere. He couldn’t remember where off the top of his head.
It functioned as the central hub of the Jupiter-leading trojan cluster—the asteroids that led Jupiter through its orbit. It had a metals refinery, an industrial site, a minor shipyard, and the only medical center in the cluster.
And not just any medical facility. One of the most cutting-edge research schools in the Sol system. Some of the best physicians in the system came from there. As he remembered, the medical school was founded by brilliant idealists that had actually managed to create what they’d intended when they’d set out from the Inner System. He was in better hands than he deserved.
“Thank you. Since you don’t know my background, I have a request to make. May I have your word that everything about me will be held as confidential?”
“You needn’t ask, since that is always how we operate here, but you have my word.”
“The Cadre put a rather large bounty on my head. I would like my presence kept to as few people as possible, and I must insist that my files be locked down.”
She nodded. “Commander Finley appraised me of that, and I assure you that only no one but I has even heard your name or the name of your ship. Everything that can be done to obscure your presence has been done. We are very discreet.”
“Excellent. The other thing I need to tell you is that you won’t find my genetic code in the Commonwealth gene base, and that the only medical records you’ll get are the ones my people probably brought you.
“I’d like to keep it that way and I insist that no copies of my DNA be kept on file. Once I’m gone, I don’t want anyone to know I was ever here.”
“I know someone that might be able to help with that paranoia,” she said dryly.
When he failed to respond, she sobered and nodded. “Very well. It will be as you wish.”
“Thank you. I suppose I should find out what treatment options are even possible with my injuries.”
“Everything except your arm is readily treatable. It presents something of a challenge, to put it mildly. If I hadn’t heard the story of what had happened to the station, I’d have been looking for whoever did the reattachment surgery to have their license revoked.
“As it is, I’m sure the nurse did the very best she could. Frankly, the fact that she succeeded as well as she did with something less than minimal supervision is an astounding feat. You should’ve lost that arm.”
The Fleet medical officer had said something similar.
“I don’t fault the nurse or the doctors,” he agreed. “I was lucky and she was more skilled than I had any right to expect.”
“Indeed. I’ve sent her an invitation to apply for instruction here. I feel she has more to offer her patients, and we might just be able to help her do so.
“That said, the nerves in your lower left arm are dead past the gross incision. Regenerating them is possible, but it will not be easy or quick. It will also be time-consuming. I wouldn’t expect to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future, Commodore.”
Brad slowly settled back against the bed. “When do we start?”
“Not today. We need to do a preliminary workups and exams. Tomorrow, I’ll start regenerating the gunshot. Perhaps the day after that, we can have enough information to begin that conversation.”
She fixed him with a steely gaze that any combat commander would instantly recognize as demanding obedience. “You just woke up, Commodore. You need to relax before I can start fixing you. And you’ll need to convince your heavily armed crew that you’re going to be just fine in our care.”
“My crew?”
Duvall snorted and lifted her wrist-comp, touching a series of keys. “Major Saburo, your commodore is awake.”
A moment later, the door to the infirmary slid open and Saburo limped in. He wasn’t dressed in the Vikings’ standard uniform but rather a set of black fatigues.
He was indeed heavily armed. He had an auto-shotgun slung over his shoulder and wore his blade and pistol on his hips.
“It is good to see you awake again, Commodore,” he said. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
“All right is stretching it, Major,” Duvall retorted. “But he is alive.”
“Why aren’t you in bed?” Brad asked as he looked over at Dr. Duvall. “He was shot in the hip.”
“I examined the wound,” she said with a shrug. “It was well treated and healing as well as can be expected since he won’t stay off it. I prescribed bed rest, but he declined.”
Saburo’s eyes briefly flitted to the doctor. “The Cadre came far too close to getting you for my peace of mind, Commodore,” Saburo said. “I was the best suited to provide protection.”
His man was keeping the fact they were short of fighting personnel between them, speaking between the lines.
“Trista Doary,” Brad said sharply, attempting to sit up and wincing as pain shot through him. “She was hurt. What’s her condition?”
Duvall put a hand on his arm. “She came through the explosion with some minor injuries, but her armor protected her vitals. Her previously broken arm is now spectacularly broken, but that is the extent of her serious injuries.
“I’ll be writing a paper about her treatment. And yours, I might add, with all identifying information scrubbed. And before you argue, that is within the bounds of my word. No one will ever know it references you, nor will they know anything about you. The treatment for your injuries, however, might help someone else in a similar situation in the future.”
He started to say something but she held up her hand. “And we are done for the day. The Major and I will retire so that you can rest. You’re going to send him back to your ship, correct?”
Her tone made that less of a question and more of an order.
Brad chuckled. “I can’t make him abandon his duty, so you might as well hang it up, Doctor. What I will do is get him to stash the auto-shotgun in a small case. I’m afraid that’s the best you’re going to get.”
She sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to accept that. Could you possibly
get him to stop glaring at my staff as if they’re assassins intent on slitting your throat?”
“I’ll try, but no promises.”
“I don’t glare,” Saburo said as he glared at the doctor.
“This is going to be a trying recovery,” Duvall said mostly to herself.
It was the next day before Dr. Duvall let Brad’s officers in to see him. By then, she’d already put him through the beginnings of his treatment: dealing with the bullet wound in his side.
When she grudgingly admitted Jason and Shelly, Brad’s midsection was still covered by the arch of the regeneration unit. He greeted them with a smile he knew was wan, but it was the best he could muster.
“You worried the Dark out of us,” Jason said quietly as the pair pulled up chairs next to his bed. “Don’t do that again, sir. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for being the man in charge, thank you.”
Even though Brad had told Jason that he wasn’t quite ready for independent command, that didn’t mean he couldn’t manage when the chips were down. That was what being an executive officer was all about.
“You’ve learned a lot in the last week, I’d wager,” Brad disagreed. “Me, too. As I’m sure Shelly is about to tell me.”
His communications officer—no, his pilot, he thought with a pang—glared at him right on cue, but he held up a hand, wincing as he did.
“Please, I don’t need the well-deserved lecture,” he told her. “I made some bad calls. I’ll listen more closely in the future.”
Her eyes softened. “How are you feeling?”
“Battered, with a few holes and a bum hand. On the positive side, I’m alive.”
By the look in her eyes, Shelly wanted to say more but heroically restrained herself. “How do you like my hometown?”
That was where he’d heard of Serenade Station. Shelly had been born and raised there.
He smiled a little. “I haven’t seen anything outside the clinic, but it seems very well equipped.”
“Yes, indeed,” Dr. Duvall said from the foot of the bed. “And some of that expensive equipment is telling me you’ve been talking too long. I need you to relax or you’re going to screw up the regen.”