Sam looked at him and felt the contempt rise in his throat like something physical, like bile bubbling up from his gut.
“That’s interesting,” he said keeping his voice under control. “I actually know every word you just said and I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No, you wouldn’t. It’s an expression we have in the real navy. Big Chicken Dinner—BCD—it stands for Bad Conduct Discharge.”
“Okay. And the rest of it?”
“BCD usually comes with six months confinement and six months pay forfeiture.”
There had been times when Sam thought Larry might turn out alright, but whatever fear ate at his soul and drove him to turn away from his better angels, it never slept, it never stopped whispering to him, nagging at him, drowning out the voice of his conscience.
What was Goldjune really afraid of? It wasn’t failure. He had too many people making sure he never stumbled, too many people making sure he couldn’t fail. No, the problem was, with all those thumbs on his side of the scale, it wasn’t enough to just not fail. No one would admire him for just average success. With all those legs up, if he didn’t make it to the top faster than anyone else, people would nod to themselves when they saw him, and think, “There goes another no-talent hack who just made it by politics and family connections.”
He really only had two choices: brightest star in the heavens, or no-talent hack. It didn’t look like brightest star was working out, so what does a person do when confronted by that? Sam suddenly understood something important.
“Poor, sad Del Huhn,” he said. “Del Huhn, another no-talent hack like you who never really succeeded at much of anything except rescuing a teenage girl from a jammed airlock. As the years drifted by he kept scaling back his dreams, didn’t he? Kept making them smaller and smaller, trying to make them attainable, so in the end he could point to having achieved something. He couldn’t even manage that, except right at the very end. But I’ll tell you something, Larry, he turned out to be twice the man you are.”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“Twice the man. He stepped up. He stepped up twice, did something you’ve never had the courage to do.”
“Courage to do what? Quit? Quit being captain? Quit living?”
“He came to where, if he kept his dreams, he’d end up destroying lives and maybe disgracing himself. Or possibly not disgrace. Maybe he could cover up his failures, get well-connected people like you to help, in return for some dirty service further down the road. But he’d know. He’d always know. He threw his future away rather than become that guy.”
“And he regretted it,” Goldjune said.
“Yeah, he had some second thoughts. Life’s never simple. But when the time came, he did it, and that’s what counts. And then he stepped up again, ended up giving his life, and I don’t think you even understand why.”
Goldjune glanced away, his mouth twisted in contempt, but also fear.
“What did he have to live for, anyway?” he asked.
“Exact same thing you and I have, Larry: the possibility of tomorrow.”
Goldjune looked at him, the anger trying to drive the fear away but not succeeding.
“Now, if you don’t mind, Mister Goldjune, I’d appreciate you getting the hell out of my cabin. Just one more thing: don’t screw up my boat.”
“It’s not your boat anymore.”
“The hell it’s not.”
Larry pushed himself off and back through the hatch, perhaps with more force than he intended because his shoulder caught the hatch frame as he passed through, and he cursed.
An hour later Sam’s door buzzed again and he saw Moe Rice in the hallway holding two drink bulbs. Sam triggered the hatch and waved him in.
“Hemlock?” he asked, nodding at the drink bulbs.
“Almost as bad: Navy beer. Besides, if it was hemlock, wouldn’t be two of ‘em. No disrespect, cap’n, but you ain’t that good a friend.”
Sam grinned, took the offered beer, and drew a mouthful—cold and bitter and cleansing. He nodded his gratitude as Moe attached his tether to the other zero-gee chair.
“So . . . is stupid up to ninety bucks a barrel yet?” Sam asked. Moe looked blank for a moment and then remembered the conversation and laughed, a deep, booming rumble.
“When was that, cap’n? Twenty years ago? Seems like two different guys.”
“No need to call me captain any more. I’m just a passenger these days. Sam will do.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that, cap’n.” Moe looked at the open file windows on Sam’s desktop. “Writin’ your memoirs?”
“Recommendations for design improvements on DDRs based on our combat experience.”
“Does it start with, ‘Find the designer and string his sorry ass up’?”
Sam laughed. “No, I think the original designers did a pretty good job. The battlescape’s changed, though. If we’re going to make destroyers work, we need smaller and more survivable carriers, maybe just lift one division per carrier instead of a full squadron. We need armor, couple layers of composite plates with expansion voids between them. We could use a better coil gun, too. A muzzle velocity of six kilometers a second isn’t getting the job done. More redundancy on the radiators. More close-in lasers and as big as we can make them. That’s a start.”
“Whew!” Moe said. “A start? Shit, son, where you going to find space for all that gear?”
“Reaction mass. We don’t need near as much as we had, given the situation we’re actually facing. Only reason we ran so low was how much we lost from battle damage. Armor will help fix that. For all the good it did us, we could ditch the thermal shroud, too.”
“You think those pinheads in BuShips will buy it?”
Sam shrugged and took another long draw of beer. “That’s their call. But I’m not the only one who can see this. I mean, it’s right there in front of you if you look. After what we did to them with our lasers, I bet we start seeing armor show up on Varoki warships. Bigger lasers, too.”
They drank in silence for a while. For the last several days Sam’s mind had been absorbed by the simple physical requirements of keeping his boat running and his crew alive. Now his thoughts seemed released to contemplate broader concerns.
“I haven’t spoken to Filipenko about much of anything but the job since the last battle. She took Bronstein’s World getting hit pretty hard. She okay?”
“Depends on what you mean,” Rice answered.
“I mean is she any happier than she was.”
“Happy,” Moe repeated thoughtfully, as if the word was unfamiliar. “Cap’n, all respect—and I mean that—but you’re gonna have a lot of disappointment going forward if you don’t get one thing straight. You can’t make everyone happy. Some folks just ain’t wired for it.”
“You’re saying she’ll never be happy.”
“Well, never’s a mighty big word. I don’t think she has been, not so long as I’ve known her. Don’t think she’s likely to until she gets square with her own self. Tell you what, though. She’s turned into a damned fine tactical officer. In the middle of a shootin’ war, I reckon that counts for something.”
Was Moe right? That Sam wanted to fix everyone, make everyone happy and see them get that way on his watch, as if their happiness was an accomplishable task, like writing an after action report? Devote X amount of time, see the task accomplished, move on.
Put that way, it didn’t sound like a virtue.
“How about you?” Moe asked. “You square with yourself?”
Sam took another swallow of beer and thought that over. He’d burned his bridges to his civilian past. He was under arrest and charged with offenses that would probably end his naval career and possibly end in incarceration. But he was alive, unlike so many others who had walked this road with him. And he hadn’t done anything he thought disgraceful.
“I am.”
His commlink vibrated and he heard Chief Gambara’s voice.
Captain, I’m sorry to disturb you. I want you to know the crew thinks this is a shitty deal you’re getting.
“Gambara, don’t you ever sleep? Why don’t you turn the comm chair over to one of your petty officers and get some rack time?”
I plan to do that, sir, but in the mean time I have a request from Commander Atwater-Jones on board HMS Exeter for a holoconference with you. I’ve got the line open if you can helmet up.
“Give me one minute and then open the channel.” Sam finished his beer in one long chug.
“Moe, thanks for the drink, but I got a call from Commander Atwater-Jones. I think I need to take it.”
Moe’s eyebrows went up a bit as he collected Sam’s beer bulb and unclipped his tether. “She’s a thoroughbred, that one is.”
“Just a professional relationship.”
Moe grinned. “Yup, and I’m the king of Sweden. Shalom, pardner.”
As soon as Moe cleared the hatch, Sam clicked on his helmet and slid his faceplate down. He found himself sitting in a neutral gray background facing Cassandra, who sat behind a narrow table or desk facing him. It appeared to be some sort of crew-access holocon cubicle on HMS Exeter. Sam smiled but said nothing for a moment, waiting for the lump in his throat to go down.
“I see the condemned man is at least allowed virtual visitors,” she said after a moment.
“How are you? I . . . I thought you were dead.”
“For a while I thought so as well,” she answered and smiled, but a bit too brightly to be believable. “Rather unsettling, being in an escape pod with the power running down and no prospect of anyone else surviving to rescue me.” She turned away and looked at something he could not see, or perhaps at nothing at all. After a moment she turned to him again.
“My joy at being so unexpectedly rescued by HMS Exeter was mitigated only by the fact that your Commander Holloway Boynton was rescued by Exeter as well. Not that I would wish a fellow-shipwrecked mariner ill, but he might have been rescued by Aradu instead. He really is quite unpleasant to be around. He is the one behind your arrest, you know.”
“The task force ops boss? No, I didn’t know. I hardly know him. I think we only spoke one time, in that first task force holocon. He ended up looking a little stupid, but it wasn’t that big a deal. Maybe he’s pals with Admiral Goldjune, or wants to be. Did Captain Kleindienst survive?”
She shook her head and looked away again. After a moment she seemed to shiver, and then took a breath, sat up straighter, and turned back to him again.
“Now, aside from expressing my happiness at your survival, and offering my heartfelt good wishes for dealing with this absurd court martial Boynton has dreamt up, I had one other important reason for contacting you. I want to ask you about these visions you have of the deceased young lady.”
Sam felt himself shiver, as if the room had turned cooler.
“Jules,” he said. “Lieutenant Julia Washington.”
“Yes. You say you always see her to one side, out of the corner of your eye, as a sort of flickering shadow. If you close your eyes, is it still there?”
“Yes, she still is.”
“Only to one side and, I imagine, only in the eye on that side.”
Sam thought for a moment.
“Yes,” he said, but he felt suddenly apprehensive. Why would he feel that way? He had nothing to hide.
“This flickering, would you describe it as almost sparkling?”
“Yes, that’s right, a sort of long, dark sparkling shadow. What are you getting at?”
Cassandra pushed on, ignoring his question.
“How do you feel when you see it?”
“How do I feel? I feel . . . sort of sick a bit. How would you feel if you realized you were seeing a ghost?”
“I imagine I should feel apprehensive,” she answered, “and the sense of unreality of the whole business would leave me somewhat detached, dissociated.”
How did she know that? Was she haunted by someone as well? Her face lacked any clearly defined expression other than concentration.
“That’s exactly how it feels.”
“And these . . . visitations often occur after you have felt considerable stress or . . . ”
“Or guilt,” Sam finished for her. “Yeah, that’s usually when she shows up.”
“And what do you do after this experience, as a general rule?”
“Tamblinson, our medtech, gave me a sedative that cleared my mind and let me sleep. I generally took it to calm down and catch a couple hours of rest.”
She nodded to herself as if confirming what she had suspected from the start.
“You aren’t seeing ghosts, Bitka, nor are you insane. You are experiencing ocular migraine, brought on by a combination of stress and prolonged weightlessness.”
“No. I had migraine headaches when I was a kid. Outgrew them, but I know what they’re like. The pain’s a killer, like the top and back of your head’s coming off, like your eyeball’s about to cave in. There’s no pain when I . . . when this happens.”
“My doctor friend—the fleet surgeon, by the way—informs me there isn’t invariably pain with ocular migraine. A full-blown migraine headache often follows within an hour or two of the onset, but not invariably so. It appears you short-circuited that with the sedative. It must have been quite powerful. Still, migraine is nothing to toy around with, especially as this is almost certainly an early symptom of intracranial hypertension. Untreated, you may begin to suffer permanent vision loss and possibly a stroke. You were weightless for nearly two months. There are medicines you can take which are better suited to address this condition. I’ll have the fleet surgeon send your medtech the prescription.”
Was that really all it had been? Just migraine? Had his mind filled everything else in? Added Jules’s ghost? Why?
Sam looked at Cassandra. After a moment she flushed and looked away, and he realized his face was wet with tears, could see them float away from his face inside his helmet, where he could do nothing to wipe them away, nothing except turn on his helmet exhaust and suck them out, like old trash swept off a floor.
It was true. He really had lost Jules, lost every bit of her, now even her ghost, forever.
Cassandra looked back and her face stiffened with anger. What would make her angry?
“You never made love to her, did you? No, not the very proper Leftenent Bitka. Wouldn’t do, would it—intimacy with a fellow-officer?”
“She was in my chain of command.”
“Of course. Against the rules and all that. Well, I suppose you’re right, it wouldn’t do, but there’s still the rub.”
Where did she get off poking a finger in his pain? She could at least let him grieve for five goddamned minutes.
“It reminds me of something de Laclos said in Les Liaisons Dangerouses,” she said. “Have you read it?”
“You know, it’s right at the top of my list of things to read once I learn French.”
For a moment she looked tired. “It’s available in translation. Don’t play the ass, Bitka. You’re not very convincing.”
“Okay, what does he or she say?”
“‘Didn’t you know that it’s not until after enjoying its delights that Love can stop being blind?’ That’s your problem, Bitka. You were never intimate with her, and so she will forever be this chaste angelic memory, perfect in every way.”
Sam felt a denial rise to his lips, but it tasted stilted and childish. It tasted like a lie. Why bother lying to her? Who cared what she thought about Jules?
“Is that so terrible?”
“Actually, yes it is,” she answered, and to Bitka’s surprise her voice broke and tears shone in her eyese. “It is an insult to her, you bloody idiot. It reduces her from a human being—as glorious in her failures as in her triumphs—to a character in a bad romance novel.”
He saw her fighting back her own tears and wondered who they were for. Jules? Sam? Herself? As if to drive her sadness back, he saw her expression harden and
her next words came out harsh.
“Love her, did you? So what? What’s the trick in loving someone who’s perfect? What’s love like that worth?”
“She was in my chair!” Sam blurted out, without ever having thought the words but now hearing them from his own mouth, understanding them, and then his own voiced cracked and the reservoir of grief and guilt he had bottled up inside so long finally broke through his defenses in a torrent and once free would not stop until it ran its course. He lowered his head, covered his helmet’s faceplate with his hands, and sobbed, unable to find his voice for what seemed like a very long time.
Finally he breathed deeply and lowered his hands.
“In the very first attack, I couldn’t get forward to my battle station because of hull damage. So she took over, manned my station, and died there.”
He looked up at Atwater-Jones who sat rigidly upright, cheeks still stained with tears but eyes wide with surprise.
“Don’t you get it? She was in my chair. It should have been me.”
She openened her mouth to speak but he pushed up his helmet faceplate, cutting the connection. He sat there for a long time, panting for air, face hot, blood pounding in his ears, as hurt and confused and angry as he could ever remember being.
And as alone.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
19 January 2134
(three days later) (twenty-ninth day in K’tok orbit)
“Stand easy, Captain Bitka. Would you care to sit?”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Sam sat, trying not to grunt as he collapsed into the armchair at his side. After more than fifty days in zero gee he was unused to carrying a hundred kilos around on his legs. His balance wasn’t very good yet, either.
Rear Admiral Victoria Crutchley, Royal Navy, was a tall, distinguished-looking woman. Sam guessed she was in her late fifties. She wore her reddish-brown hair long and gathered in a fairly elaborate bun-and-braid arrangement—the sort of hairdo unseen in the US Navy and not that common even in European service. It gave her an old-fashioned look, as if a relic of an era long gone.
Sam sat in front of the admiral’s desk in her day cabin on the habitat wheel of FGS Thüringer, the heavy cruiser flagship of the newly formed Outworld Coalition Combined Fleet. With more reinforcements on the way, the word was she would soon be superseded by a US Navy vice admiral, but for now she was the boss. The admiral examined him with curiosity.
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