by Diane Carey
After the door closed, and after it had been closed several seconds, McCoy breathed a shaky sigh of relief and began to move his limbs again. “African ritual?”
“I can smell the incense.” She touched her face, the rich dark skin that now had turned pasty and tired, and was glad there wasn’t a mirror in here. “The time’s come to stop him even if it costs our lives.”
McCoy’s brows popped up. “You said the olivium is just rocks.”
“Yes, but now he’s giving the enemy our rocks. That changes everything.”
“We have a shipful of thugs. We can’t outmuscle them.”
“Maybe we can turn them against Maidenshore somehow . . . show them he’s not the god-protector he proclaims himself to be.”
The doctor shivered visibly. Fear? Probably. She didn’t blame him. They’d faced death before, many times, but usually the final decision was someone else’s. Odd that it should be so difficult now that it was their own decision.
“I’ve been thinking about his psych profile,” McCoy said then, proving fear wasn’t working on him quite yet. “I suspect you’re the only person he has any respect for or genuine interest in as a person, probably in years. Besides himself, I mean. His pathology isn’t all that unique. There have been manic egotistical people completely lacking in ethics or conscience—some even end up in high office. One of the survival techniques of this type is that he doesn’t care about anyone or respect anyone, so no one else matters. Every once in a while, a need bubbles to the surface where he has to have somebody else’s respect. It probably only happens once or twice in his whole life.”
Uhura leaned forward and rubbed her hands to bring warmth back to the fingers. “We can use that.”
Instantly McCoy digested the kind of game she was implying. “It can also be dangerous. If he thinks you’re withholding your respect from him too much, he could snap in a rage.”
“And kill me?”
“It’s happened before. If he can’t get what he wants, he may kill it. Once you’re gone, he’ll convince himself he never wanted your respect, or that he had it but you were keeping it from him and you deserved to die. He’ll never get it, because what he wants from you is a fantasy. He’s destined to be let down. Nobody will ever like him as well as he likes himself.”
Uhura accepted what he had to say, and hadn’t seen anything in Billy Maidenshore to contraindicate McCoy’s conclusions. Maidenshore was a man much less important than he believed he was, concerned with his comfort, his legacy, his own personal aggrandizement.
“We’re walking a very thin tightrope,” she said. “Are you ready to step off the platform?”
Comforting places. Cemeteries, morgues, tombs. All the troubles were over by then.
In the Peleliu’s small hangar bay, dozens of bodies lay in pathetic order, side by side because nobody could figure out a better way. Each wore some sort of shroud. The first three dozen were draped with UFP flags. Then the quartermaster’s locker had run dry. The next two rows were covered with spark tarps. After that, bunk blankets. There were plenty of those. But the crew didn’t prefer to use their bed linens as shrouds unless such a mournful use became unavoidable. No one liked to sleep in his own coffin.
Savannah Ring and one of the security men picked their way through the rows of bodies, toting the remains of poor Helmsman Makarios, politely encased in a body bag. His death had, at least, been instant. Since there was no sickbay left, since there were no doctors, nurses, interns, corpsmen, or lab techs, it had become Ring’s job to catalogue the dead. For that, she had to make sure they were all laid out here. After the recognizable ones would come the unrecognizable ones, and after that the grim task of matching up limbs to other body parts.
Without a word, after they deposited the latest installment, she motioned the security guy to leave. Her leg needed a rest. She reached down and adjusted the walking splint that supported her left leg from foot to knee. The leg was broken, but could function in the splint for a couple of days. Painful, though. She had to move slowly, and be careful not to turn the foot.
Once the guard was gone, she picked her way through the reposing bodies. All the faces were scrupulously covered, if they had faces. Other parts remained visible, poking from the edges of rumpled blankets, tarps, and standards. Identification would come later, then burial in space.
There lay McAddis. His body took up the space of two. Most of him, including his face, was covered by a UFP standard. The rest—both arms, one leg—splayed outward, eternally stiffened down to the last follicle and fingernail by the spray sealant, now hard as flecked granite. It would continue to cure, forever entombing McAddis in his formfitted vault. His fingers, blue-coated and spread wide, would always carry that appearance of shock and strain, every tendon showing. He only had one leg now. The other had been cut off where it stuck through the fissure in the bridge dome. There had been no other way. The edges of the hardened sealant were scorched brown from the phaser torches that had been used to cut him free.
Might not be a bad way, if you had time to plan for it.
Savannah made her way closer, paused for a moment to commune with McAddis’s covered face. The thin fabric of the UFP standard came to a point over his nose. A morbid wish gripped her to pull it back and take one more look at his expression, his eyes crimped with horror and bravery, lips stretched back to scream that last awful demand.
Nick Keller couldn’t take it, though.
She folded her legs and sat down. He knew she was here. He’d talk when he was ready.
He lay at McAddis’s side, stretched out facedown, with his arms folded to support his head. He’d disappeared from the bridge without a word as soon as they realized the enemy couldn’t find them anymore. The damage crews, what was left of them, had moved in. Keller had moved aside.
Now he was down here, under the half-lights that cast a twilight effect on the bay’s quiet residents.
Two hours ago, Savannah had thought they were done finding bodies. Then more had been discovered in the twisted wreckage of decks nine and ten, and a couple in a nacelle strut where they’d been caught while trying to make mid-battle repairs.
Settling onto the deck between McAddis and the next body, she looked across the stiffened form at Keller.
His face was hidden, obscured by his folded arms, and by being turned away from her.
She pressed her spine up against the dead guy on the other side and her two feet on McAddis. The dead were always accommodating company, did what they could for you.
Though Keller didn’t move, his voice scratched from over on the deck.
“Did I kill Lake?”
Savannah adjusted her injured leg. “Did you want to?”
Quiet moments passed. Almost a minute. The peaceful bay was cooler than usual, deliberately. Savannah rubbed her leg to stanch the ache.
Finally the suction of her presence pulled him over and into a mediocre sitting position. He hitched up to press his back against the accordion door of the shuttle hangar, never once raising his eyes from their unfocused relationship with the deck. His long legs tumbled out before him in no particular order. His shoulders sagged as he rested his wrists on his knees. Didn’t seem very comfortable.
His hands were scratched and reddened. In his fingers he held the Challenger coin. He turned it and turned it.
As they sat, companionable and silent, two more crewmen slogged in with another body. Arsini and Niedleman, carrying Melinda Clark. Sad. Clark and Arsini were a local rumor around engineering.
They put her down, met Savannah’s eyes briefly, then simply left as they saw Nick Keller sitting there in his pall, enduring the nefarious confrontation. Not with Lake, Savannah guessed, but with himself.
Keller was watching the two crewmen as they picked their way back out of the bay. He noticed their condition. Dirty, ragged, ripped, weak, scorched. Pretty much the condition of the ship, except that these men could still move. He said nothing.
Nothing. The scary part wa
s that his eyes also said nothing.
“Might as well come back to the bridge,” Savannah suggested. “Zane brought some of Shucorion’s crew up to clean it. They work like ants. They even polished the polyduranide sheeting. What was left of it.”
Politely demonstrating her point, one of the Blood crew appeared briefly in the bay control hatchway, busily working a suction broom along the crux between the deck and the bulkhead.
Keller watched the studious Blood concentrating on the task. He wagged one of his hands in a pitiful shrug.
“Can’t push the stink back into the skunk,” he condensed.
Savannah laughed briefly. Something about the sound of ultimate truth gave her a tickle.
“Zane says it’s all because you’re a Taurus instead of a Pisces.”
“He thinks a Pisces would’ve won?”
“No. He thinks a Pisces would’ve failed.”
The words sank in, but still he didn’t look up. He continued to peer at the deck between his knees. “Captain Kirk warned me about this. He said I’d have to choose between a wrong and a wrong.”
His moccasin-brown hair still bore flecks of the sealant he had sprayed all over the dome fissure. Needed a cut. Like most country boys, he didn’t like getting a haircut very often. He preferred the style he’d found useful back on his parents’ ranch, just long enough on the neck to fend off a sunburn, but no longer.
No point arguing with him.
“I was all wrapped up about Roger,” he went on when she didn’t interrupt. “I didn’t listen to the right things carefully enough. It didn’t become crystal clear until people were dying around me. I had too much loyalty for my captain and too little for my crew. I didn’t know about the line you cross when you become Command. Loyalty has to shift the other way.”
Around them the lights went dim, wobbled a couple of times, went completely dark for an instant, then recovered. They came back on, but not quite at the level of a moment ago. Now the bay was even dimmer. Still, Keller didn’t look up.
“Another power falloff,” Savannah mentioned. “The generators are working overtime.” She tipped her head back to enjoy the change.
Keller, though, was now looking past his knee to the covered form of Tim McAddis.
“It’s doing what it knows is right,” he said. “If I’d done the right thing at the right time, these people wouldn’t be dead. Tim wouldn’t be dead. Kirk might not have left.”
“I could kick you,” Savannah awarded, “if you think it’d make you feel better.”
He sliced her with a caustic glare. “Beelzebitch.” When she smiled, he did too, a little. He turned the coin over and over.
Savannah seized on the movement of his fingers. “You’re going to wear the faces off those people if you keep doing that.”
He sniffed and rubbed his nose and his bloodshot eyes. “They didn’t make it, y’know.”
“Who?”
“The shuttle crew.”
“They didn’t? You mean they scrubbed the mission?”
“Ship blew up.”
“No kidding . . . on the pad?”
“Just after blastoff. Minute or two into the launch. They had a leak of some kind. They shouldn’t have launched in cold weather. They made a bad call. Whole orbiter and its solid rocket booster Roman-candled.”
Even Savannah grimaced in empathy at the picture they now shared.
Suddenly passive, Keller drew a long breath and sighed it out. He reached across the hangar door behind him and patted a nearby buttress. “It was the only shuttle they lost. Mighty good, when you consider they were riding a nova every time they hit that launch button. Took a lot of grit in those days. But you’re only as good as your ship.”
He clutched the coin in one hand, and with the other hand he rubbed the deck beside him as if he were petting an old dog.
“Did you see how long she kept fighting?”
Savannah tipped her head, wondering if she understood. “The . . . ship?”
He nodded. “She didn’t give up. They had to bleed her dry. Even then we still had air. Do you know how remarkable that is? Peleliu never quit. A half-dozen enemy ships . . . and they had to do the quitting.”
What could she say? Tell him the ship was finished? Describe to him what Bonifay and Lewiston had said about the collapsed grids, the missing chunks of hull, the burned driver coils, and the cracked fusion sphere? How they had described their vessel as a shell, scorched from the inside out and back again?
Or would it be better to mention that all the other command officers except Lewiston were dead or incapacitated, and that Lewiston had no command experience of any kind? Even three other department heads were dead. There were noticeably fewer lieutenants, never mind lieutenant commanders. In fact there was only one lieutenant commander. Guess who.
Keller pressed his hand to his own chest and rubbed hard. “How do you know when you’re dead? I don’t think my heart’s beating. I just can’t feel it anymore.”
Savannah had already decided not to speak when one of the nearest access hatches slid open and spared her the choice.
In came Shucorion. The Blood leader had another body draped over his shoulder, wrapped in a bunk blanket, just the boots sticking out the bottom end. Laying the dead crewmen into place at the end of the row, he grunted slightly with the strain, pressed a hand to his own leg—Savannah remembered Harrison treating that wound—and turned to the two of them.
The Blood didn’t seem surprised to find them here. In fact, Savannah got a subliminal telegram that he’d scooped up a body as a ticket in. She accepted delivery despite the lack of evidence.
Keller didn’t look up, Savannah noted, but his expression became smoky. He fixed instead on Shucorion’s gray leggings moving in and finally kneeling before him.
Shucorion ignored Savannah completely and paid strict attention to the ship’s sorriest officer.
“The Blind has lifted,” he informed. “Your engineer believes we can limp around the sun on docking thrusters, then send a message for assistance.”
“Calling the colony for help,” Keller grumbled. “We’re supposed to be the help.”
“We must try,” Shucorion told him, speaking softly. “Kauld will return. Vellyngaith has not been defeated. When the Blind comes again, they’ll return.”
For the first time, Keller looked up. “Why did they break off? Do you know?”
The Blood only shook his head. His deep brown hair caught the overhead lights and turned back a rosy sheen. He shifted a little closer now that he had Keller’s full attention.
“This is time to work,” he said. “Your friend is shamed if you stay here with him. He doesn’t want you here.”
Boldly he took a grip on Keller’s forearm in a manner than suggested he wouldn’t let go. Savannah watched with anticipation—that grip could mean many things.
“The dead are dead, Mr. Keller,” Shucorion reminded. “Rise and work.”
With those words rolling between them, Keller let himself be pulled to his feet. As soon as he was on them, before even letting go of the other man’s arm, he shot out a right cross that decked Shucorion in one swipe. The Blood tumbled backward, caught his heel on Tim McAddis’s stone-stiff arm, dropped onto his backside, then sat there, braced by both hands and his bent legs as Keller stepped out of his self-inflicted cell and stood over him briefly before stalking out.
“Mind your own business,” he pleasantly suggested.
Peleliu’s captain’s quarters
Two days later, in orbit at Belle Terre
“Nick! Good to see you. We squeaked out of that one somehow. I can’t wait to hear all about it. Sit down. Give me a report. You want some papaya juice?”
“No, thanks, no juice.”
Nick Keller hitched up onto the dresser and sat with his back to the mirror. He really didn’t want to get a look at himself right now. He had nothing else now to look at but Roger Lake, confined to his bed on nominal life-support because there was no sickbay.
The captain didn’t look too bad, but the head injury was serious and needed time to heal. The portable life-support crash cart next to him provided intravenous stabilizers and a brainwave monitor just in case of sudden changes.
“We’re in orbit at Belle Terre,” Keller reported, rather blandly. He wasn’t happy about any of this, not even about getting back to the planet. That meant he had to face other things. “We came back around the sun on docking thrusters, then sent a call for assistance soon as we could. Commander Scott sent a mule engine by remote. We were towed in.”
“Lot of damage?”
“Too much. Almost complete systems failure across the board. The driver coils, the sphere, the hull all over the ship—”
“How’s the bridge?”
“A wreck.”
“Yeah. I felt that wreck.” Roger Lake sipped at his glass of juice, gazing into it as if it were a crystal ball. “Lost McAddis, I hear.”
To respond in any way, after hearing Lake speak Tim’s name, somehow seized up in Keller’s mind.
Lake smothered his next words in another slug of juice. “Sorry about him. Bad way to go.”
Keller reached across the gulf between the dresser and the bed and pulled the cup out of Lake’s hands. “How ’bout we just set this down and you talk to me.”
Surprised, Lake settled back against the extra pillows. His eyes and manner were both remarkably steady.
“Sure, Nick . . . talk.”
The mirror was cool on Keller’s back, even through his uniform shirt. His jacket was gone, dumped somewhere. He wore only his rib-necked white shirt. The idea of wearing the uniform jacket right now just made him sick to his stomach. Even the white shirt made him feel too obvious, too easy to find.
He held the juice glass in his hands, and looked down into the orange pool.
“You’re told all your life,” he began, “to be loyal to those in command. They don’t tell you that you get to a certain point and you cross an imaginary line where loyalty shifts in the other direction. It’s what Derek was trying to tell me before he died in the lift. You start looking back to your crew instead of up to your captain.”