At least that’s what they did under normal circumstances. But the eye of a vortex was not a normal location.
“Retract forward vanes,” he ordered.
“Vanes retracted,” she replied, and the ship began to shimmy in response.
Immediately, reports of structural slippage were heard around the bridge. Kel-Paten ignored them.
“Invert aft vanes, fifteen percent.”
She tapped at her screen. “Fifteen.”
“Start with a five percent pitch, Sebastian, then give me a two percent increase on my marks.”
“Affirmative, Admiral. At five.”
He watched twenty seconds click by on his vision field.
“Mark.”
“At seven.”
Twenty more seconds.
“Mark.”
“At nine. Must be jelly ’cause jam don’t shake like this,” she added.
At nineteen percent, the shimmying noticeably subsided. He could feel the helm responding to his commands. At twenty-seven percent, the Vax seemed to find her space legs again. Overhead lighting flickered back on, and at least five of the fifteen-odd alarms ceased to wail.
It was an encouraging sound. Almost as encouraging as…Well, he’d think about her words later. Right now he had an illogical appearance of a vortex to decipher, a damaged ship to deal with, and two of his engineering officers requesting his input. All on top of more reports from First Fleet captains detailing Illithian attacks in the Zone, and the threat of yet another Rebashee uprising in Danvaral.
He pushed himself out of his seat and headed for the lower bridge. They had lived through the worst of the vortex. He took it as an omen to mean he had time yet to tell her how he felt. And time yet for her to say the words he had waited almost twelve years to hear.
She was on his ship. With him. For the rest…there was time.
UPPER BRIDGE, COMMAND SLING
It took almost two and a half hours for operations on the bridge to return to some semblance of normalcy, with only the never-ending litany of damage reports hinting at the severity of the encounter. What they’d experienced—a rogue vortex, for the lack of any more-accurate classification—Sass left to Kel-Paten and the science team to unravel. The ship and her crew were things she could contend with.
“Sebastian to sick bay. Come up for air yet, Doc?” Sass could almost see Eden’s responding grimace to her question.
“I think we’ll make it,” said Eden’s disembodied voice over the command-sling comm. “Briefly, we have four concussions, fifteen broken arms, eight broken legs, and more bumps and bruises than I have space in my medical logs to record.”
“And the furzels?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“Cabin monitors show them back to their usual mischief.”
Knowing Tank, that could be good or bad news. Sass allowed herself a small grin. “Sounds like you earned this week’s pay. Keep me informed. Sebastian out.”
She flicked off the comm, leaned back in her seat, and let out the sigh she’d held in for she didn’t know how long. The sound must have drawn Kel-Paten’s attention. He turned from where he stood near the upper-bridge railing.
“I’d like to do a physical inspection of ship’s damage,” he told her after a lengthy moment of silence.
Why not? she thought. Hell, it was only 0145 in the morning. She glanced down at her pink sweatpants and realized she still wore her No, No, Bad Captain! shirt. A hands-on of the ship would probably take another two hours. After that she could fall directly into bed and wake up two hours later for her ritual workout with Eden Fynn. Still in her sweats. How convenient! She grinned in spite of the dull ache between her shoulder blades.
She pushed herself out of her seat. “Want to start in engineering?”
He was silent for a moment, his expression unreadable. “Sick bay. Engineering after that.”
The suggestion surprised her, though she said nothing as she followed him down the corridor to the lifts. Sick bay was where she started after any trauma on board the Regalia. But Kel-Paten…it was well known he rarely showed up in sick bay except under the direst of circumstances. Maybe, she mused, all that shimmying finally shook some compassion into that cybernetic system of his.
If it did, he might be willing to give credence to Eden’s request to take a shuttle back to Lightridge. They may have bested a vortex, but those unexplained deaths still worried her. If only they didn’t have that damned runaway pirate to find.
SICK BAY
Eden Fynn was too tired to hide her surprise when Kel-Paten showed up in her ER. His dislike of medical facilities was well known. She didn’t blame him. If someone had cut off her arms and legs when she was a teenager and replaced them with biocybernetic limbs, she wouldn’t have pleasant memories of the place either. However, any comment she might make was preempted by an emergency call from the bridge.
Again.
Kel-Paten swung around to the intraship vidscreen on the nearest bulkhead, with Tasha only steps behind him.
“An unidentified ship, sir,” Commander Kel-Faray informed him, his dusky face creased with concern. “Seems we dragged her out of the vortex with us. She’s badly damaged and breaking up.”
“Life forms?”
“Four humanoid, and one’s fading fast,” the Vax’s new first officer said. “But it won’t matter if the ship—”
“Transport all survivors to sick bay. And send a full security team.” He glanced to his left. “You’re about to have a few more visitors, Doctor.”
“We can handle it” was her professional reply. Already her med team angled equipment into position.
Four broad beams of light coalesced into human forms on top of the emergency diagnostic tables. Blue-coated personnel swarmed around them, with Eden heading her own team at the first diag bed. She ran the medicorder briefly over the still form of an elderly man who had died from his injuries minutes before being transported. Real injuries, not fear. Nothing like Degun’s Luck.
She recorded time of death and moved automatically to the next bed, her scanner parading the important data before her eyes: Male. Humanoid. Approximately forty-one years of age. Six foot three and one-half inches. Two hundred twenty-two pounds. Respiration was rapid but not life-threateningly so. Blood pressure elevated.
The medicorder categorized his injuries: concussion, broken left wrist, some minor internal bruising to the left side. She was about to move on—he’d make it on his own for now—when her patient stirred and groaned softly.
Immediately she reached out and laid her hand gently against his face, which felt stubbly from several days’ growth of beard.
“Shhh,” she crooned. “You’re safe. You’re on board the Alliance ship Vaxxar.”
Jet-dark lashes fluttered against bruised cheekbones.
“Admiral.” Kel-Faray’s voice filtered through the vidscreen behind her. “We have a positive ID on the ship that broke up.”
The lashes parted, revealing startlingly deep-blue eyes. Not pale like the admiral’s, but dark like the jeweled waters of the Isarrian Ocean.
Something buried under several layers of professional medical training exclaimed, Damn, but this guy is gorgeous! Right from the tips of his scuffed boots to the gray pants that hugged well-muscled thighs, to the torn shirt that revealed a flat, hard stomach, to the square jaw with that damnably attractive cleft, to his night-dark long hair that escaped its careless tie and now lay against his shoulders—he was unequivocally gorgeous.
Quickly, she shook herself back to reality and mentally readjusted her “doctor’s cap.” “Just lie still. You’ve been injured—”
“The Vaxxar?” the man’s voice rasped painfully. He licked at dry lips.
“Go ahead, Kel-Faray,” Kel-Paten said from where he stood at the screen.
“You’re on the Vaxxar,” Eden repeated calmly.
The man’s gaze seemed centered on her chest. Eden belatedly realized her lab coat hung open and the front zipper on her black and t
an Alliance uniform jumpsuit had somehow snaked down, revealing the sheer blue lace of her bra. She hurriedly yanked on the zipper’s tab.
“We believe the ship destroyed was Captain Serafino’s ship, the Novalis,” Kel-Faray’s voice informed sick bay.
Kel-Paten turned, and a low, bitter expletive escaped his lips. The sound drew the man’s attention, and slowly, painfully, he turned his head in Kel-Paten’s direction.
The admiral cut through the throng of med-techs and strode up next to Eden. “Serafino.” He spat out the name, anger tingeing every syllable.
Jace Serafino responded with a cocky, lopsided grin. “It’s good to see you too, Tin Soldier. And you are…?” He grasped Eden’s hand and brought it to his lips.
Eden stared in shock. This was the damned pirate? The agent gathering intelligence on the Illithians? The staff meeting outlining the mission to find him had clearly detailed all his sins and the specs on his ship—but hadn’t provided, she realized with a start, one clear holo-image of the man. She wasn’t sure even a clear one would’ve done him justice.
She drew her hand away immediately as Tasha stepped up next to her. “I’m Dr. Fynn, Chief Medical Officer.”
He laughed softly at her discomfort, then coughed from the effort.
“Captain Serafino,” Eden said sternly, “you really must—”
“Wait. Don’t trank me out yet, sweetling,” his voice rasped. “No, No, Bad Captain!” he read out loud. “Of course. This has to be Sebastian.” He winked at her.
It was Tasha’s turn. “Captain Serafino—”
“Damn, Kel-Paten, I really have to compliment you,” he said, turning away from her. “A truly creative and inspiring choice of uniforms for your officers.”
And with that pronouncement, Jace Serafino promptly passed out.
CORRIDOR, SICK BAY DECK
Sass lengthened her stride in an attempt to keep up with Kel-Paten, who barked orders into his comm link on their way back to the bridge.
“I want every bit of debris you can find. Do you understand me, Lieutenant?”
They turned the corner. Two black-clad maintenance crew dove out of their way.
No need for my morning jog with Eden, Sass thought as she trotted alongside, listening to the salvage-crew lieutenant try to reason with Ol’ No-Excuses Kel-Paten.
“I don’t care what the current equipment limitations are. If you have to, Lieutenant, you get out there with every godsdamned sieve from the godsdamned galley and bring me everything that may have been even remotely connected to the Novalis!”
She understood his insistence, even if she didn’t much like his method. Illithian border breaches had become more plentiful of late, casting serious doubts on the efficacy of the Fleet—something Kel-Paten took personally. Serafino’s mission could have provided answers to that problem. But Serafino had turned the tables or turned tail, she wasn’t sure which. Whatever answers Kel-Paten couldn’t wrench out of “the damned pirate” might be found on his ship—or what was left of it. Sadly, a sieve might be the only useful tool.
They reached the lifts, breathing hard. Sass considered taking her pulse and jogging in place. She certainly was in appropriate attire but doubted that Kel-Paten, standing with his hands shoved in his pants pockets and scowling fiercely at the closed lift doors, would find her actions the least bit funny.
That she found them downright hysterical only told her how bloody tired she was.
And relieved. Sebastian, Serafino had called her. Not Sass and, thank the deities, not Lady Sass. So he didn’t recognize her. At least, not in his semiconscious state. There was always the chance he might when his injuries healed. She hastily threw together a few facts—and a handful of rather pretty lies—that would work as a cover story for the dealings she had had with him when she was part of Gund’jalar’s mercenary cell and working arms runners like Serafino had been her job for the UCID. If she was lucky—and she prayed she wasn’t over quota on luck this week—she wouldn’t deal with him again. She’d gladly relegate that duty to Kel-Paten and knew the admiral would have it no other way, not after the embarrassment Serafino and the Mystic Traveler—his ship back then—had caused Kel-Paten years ago out by Fendantun on the Vaxxar’s shakedown cruise. The sneak attack had not only taken out the Vax’s aft shields but launched a jammer drone up a missile tube, rendering all on-board communications systems useless. More annoying than dangerous, had there not been three top Fleet admirals on board. Ever since then, Serafino was Kel-Paten’s personal nemesis. His attitude in the staff meeting had made that abundantly clear.
Still, she didn’t want to stir up old memories. She had no desire to spend the next few weeks in the Vaxxar’s brig if someone like Kel-Paten started poking holes in her past and realized that Sass wasn’t the simple derivative of Tasha that people often assumed it to be. It was the only name she had for the first twenty years of her life and—for a period of time after that—it had acquired a small bit of notoriety.
Notoriety that could put her career—and her life—in serious jeopardy if the Triad found out that the new captain of the Vax had started hijacking Triad supply ships when she was sixteen. That was one of the many things Gund’jalar had taught her.
The deck numbers on the lift panel before her crawled by. She propped herself up against the wall next to the doors. The metallic sheeting felt pleasantly cool through her thin T-shirt. She closed her eyes, longing for five seconds of peace and quiet. Well, as much peace and quiet as one could expect after what the Vaxxar had just gone through. But after all her years in space, the continuous chatter over shipboard comms—requesting Lieutenant So-and-So to report to Such-and-Such or advising Team Whatever that the Who-Gives-A-Lubashit Drill was about to commence—no longer registered in her mind.
Kel-Paten’s deep voice did.
“Hypothesis, Sebastian, since I gather you do not find the sudden appearance of the Novalis disturbing.”
Sass opened one eye and peered up at him. His gloved hands were crossed over his chest. Classic defensive posture. My, we’re a bit testy this morning, aren’t we? And gods, it was morning—about 0230 or later if the aches in her body were correct.
She closed her eye. “I find,” she said, after a deep breath and the requisite counting to ten that was supposed to help but never really did, “the sudden appearance of the Novalis and Captain Serafino to be just one more damned thing to deal with.”
“Sebastian—”
Pause.
There was always the pause after her name. The glare. It was a small ritual she’d most times found humorous, almost endearing. But right now it only fed her annoyance.
Reluctantly, she shoved herself away from the wall. “With all due respect, Admiral, the appearance of Serafino at our doorstep certainly saves us the time and expense of going to look for him. Do I find that a bit odd?” She rephrased his question. “Yes. But disturbing?” She shook her head. “Not yet, not without further information.”
“You don’t find it disturbing that, within twenty-four hours of when we were commissioned to find Serafino, he suddenly shows up, along with an inexplicable vortex?”
No, I don’t have your paranoia, she thought. A second later she chastised herself. Just because their leadership styles were different—vastly different—and she was at the moment tired and cranky, didn’t mean she had to be so critical. She understood the pressure he faced to recover Serafino. It wasn’t so much the two hundred fifty thousand credits that Serafino had allegedly absconded with. It was the fact that those two hundred fifty thousand credits were part of the Alliance’s payment to him for undercover services that apparently were never rendered. The Triad Ministry of Intelligence was having furzel fits over it. No doubt they’d want Serafino delivered for interrogation and prosecution, most likely to Fendantun or Panperra. That meant, again, going in the opposite direction of the Degun’s Luck mystery on Lightridge.
Eden wouldn’t be happy. But Sass suspected an unhappy Doc Eden was easier for Kel-
Paten to deal with than an unhappy Ministry of Intelligence.
The lift signal pinged.
Kel-Paten allowed her to enter the empty lift first. He gave the voice command for the bridge as the doors closed, then glanced down at her, probably wondering if she was going to answer his question.
She sighed. “I will not jump to conclusions before I have all the facts. If you’re suggesting that Serafino or his ship somehow caused that vortex, I can’t even guess how that would be possible. Unless the Triad has some kind of secret weapon project you’ve decided not to share with us.”
Dark brows slanted down. Pale eyes narrowed. Hmm, he didn’t like that suggestion one bit.
“Okay, okay. Hypothesis withdrawn.” She gave a tired half wave of one hand. “So let’s look at the facts. We are in a quadrant Serafino is known to frequent, according to HQ’s report. You suggested at the staff meeting a few hours ago that it was your opinion we weren’t far behind him. Actually, it seems we were in front of him, because somehow he got piggybacked to our—oh, never mind.” He was giving her one of those sideways warning looks. She decided to ignore him before her tired mind fueled her temper.
She was still ignoring him when the lift pinged again to signal they’d reached Deck 1. She barged past him and strode down the corridor.
“Sebastian!” he called after her.
She stopped just short of the bridge doors and turned. Was that a glimpse of a smile just now leaving his face? She must be more tired than she thought. Ol’ No-Excuses Kel-Paten never smiled.
“Let’s get some coffee,” he offered. “I need to do some thinking aloud about how the Illithians are getting past our patrols. You know I work better if you’re there to punch holes in every hypothesis I come up with.”
“Sure,” she said, unable to hide the note of surprise in her voice at his sudden change of tone. “I desperately need coffee right now.”
He activated the comm link clipped to his shirt. “Kel-Faray, the captain and I will be in my office. I want an update on all damage reports in fifteen minutes. And everything and anything that salvage comes up with on the Novalis as soon as you hear from them.”
Games of Command Page 3