by Lyn Gala
“So, you’re standing by her?”
Tom could feel Ramsay’s anger, but the captain had been right about one thing—Tom wasn’t good at changing direction once he’d picked a course. “Yep,” he agreed. “Six years I followed you, Captain, and I ain’t looking for us to end as enemies, but as crazy as some of your plans were, I always felt you were leading somewhere and I followed. Now you ain’t leading anywhere, sir. You’re just as tangled up as the rest of us and Da’shay’s got something in her head to get us free of this mess. Besides, from everything that’s been said in this room, something ain’t right. If there’s even a slim chance to stop a war, I’ll take it. “
“And if she gets you killed?”
Tom shrugged. “I thought you were going to do that years ago. It never kept me from following your orders.”
For some reason, that seemed to stop Ramsay. He stared at Tom as if he’d just seen a meaiai in front of his face or something. Da’shay caught Tom’s arm and pressed herself to his side.
“Captain,” Becca said softly, “she sent the decoded broadcast.”
“Well, shit.” Ramsay pressed his lips together into a thin line. “And you’re telling me to my face you’d take her orders over mine?” Ramsay demanded as he stared at Tom. The danger filled the room like smoke and Tom had to fight not to put his hand to his gun.
“Yep,” Tom agreed. Da’shay moved behind him and caught Tom’s gun hand, clinging to it, so Tom was guessing she didn’t want him to shoot Ramsay, not even if the captain decided to shoot him as a traitor. A year ago, Tom wouldn’t have worried about Ramsay turning on him, but now he figured the captain had it in him.
Ramsay looked around the room. “I want to make this very clear. As far as I’m concerned, we’re under a war order from this point on. Justice and discipline will not wait for us to get back to dock and disobeying a direct order is treason, punishable by death. Is that absolutely clear?”
Ramsay looked at Eli and then Becca, getting a soft, “Yes sir” from each before he turned to Tom. Tom’s stomach was knotted and Da’shay was holding his gun hand hard enough that the fingers were starting to go numb. “If I give you a direct order, are you going to follow my orders or Da’shay?” Ramsay didn’t look much like himself. He had a hard edge to him.
“Da’shay,” Tom answered.
Ramsay clenched his teeth and looked down for a second and Tom figured the man was trying to harness his temper.
“Then you get off this ship before you do something that gets you killed, Tom,” Ramsay said without looking up. “Sergeant Antelli, escort the corporal and pilot to their quarters to collect their personal gear. I want everything searched. Nothing that compromises our cover leaves the Kratos; they’ve already done us enough damage.”
Tom didn’t bother looking to see if Eli would follow orders—he would. Tom turned toward the exit, but he had to wait because Da’shay didn’t seem as anxious to leave as he did.
“Spinning teal, muddy gray,” she said seriously as she looked at Ramsay.
He sighed. “Tom, I almost hope you’re right. But if you’re not, you just cost Command any advantage they might have had in the attack. That transmission from Command was so encoded it took Eli six hours to untangle and we have Command codes and equipment. They think they have a communication shutdown and you went and put a hole in that curtain. I’d suggest you two stick to the slave colonies unless you want to face treason charges.”
Tom didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything left to say. It wasn’t as if Ramsay was the first to decide that Tom made too many mistakes to bother sticking up for him.
Da’shay finally turned and headed back toward her quarters and Tom followed so close that the loop of the leash hung nearly to the ground. Eli followed behind and Tom wondered where he was going to end up if he kept following her. He doubted she could explain and he doubted he’d understand the politics of aliens well enough to understand if she tried. All he could do was cover her back and hope she saw some way clear of this mess.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hou’s secretary looked downright panicked when they walked in, but Tom couldn’t blame the man. Tom propped the carryall with all their belongings up on its end and waited to see what Da’shay would do. She seemed to look around with one of her blank expressions and he could feel panic start to crawl though his guts.
She turned toward him and smiled. Closing the distance, she cupped his face and leaned forward until their foreheads touched and then she let him hold her weight for several seconds. Then, standing up straight, she seemed to shake herself free of whatever had caught her. “Hou,” she announced to the secretary.
“You don’t… I mean… He’s very busy…” The man was walking backward through the maze of desks and workers and slaves, who were all gathering up materials and handhelds and desk flats and papers in their arms. They were expecting a fight and Tom watched Da’shay to see if she wanted him to oblige.
Before she could give any clear signal, the office door opened and Hou stood there, his enormous bulk filling the oversized doorway.
“Illogical human conclusions. Explosives are counterintuitive to trading. I trade.” Sometimes it was hard to judge how a genta was feeling, but Tom could tell pretty easy that Hou was pissed.
“Come,” Da’shay said before she started toward Hou. Tom caught the handle of the carryall and pulled it behind him without taking his right hand off his gun.
Hou backed up as Da’shay and Tom came into the room. A vid screen had slid down in front of the shelves, and Tom could see that newswoman’s face on it and Captain Tarby’s picture at the bottom of the image. So he’d gotten Da’shay’s message.
Da’shay looked at the screen, her head tilted. “Human premise—the entity that set the first bomb set the second, the first bomb was on a known slaver ship, slaver ships carry merchandise from slave colonies. Conclusion—the slave colonies have attacked valued human. Retribution is logical.”
“Flawed premises,” Hou snapped. He hit a button and a dozen files, most of them with Earth Command logos, flashed onto the vid, covering the newswoman. “New premises, more accurate.”
Da’shay walked closer, her fingers ghosting over the screen so that the vid flickered as the computer tried to decide if she was selecting one or not. Her fingers paused over a file and touched the surface. An official arrest report appeared. Da’shay turned and looked at Tom. “You explain.”
“Me?” Tom felt a cold seed of fear. He was not interested in exposing his past as a Command soldier—not when he was standing in the office of a slaving embryo smuggler.
“Accuracy with bullets does not create accuracy in the reading of documents,” Hou said. Tom figured he should be offended, but it was the truth. Him and paperwork were not on speaking terms and he really didn’t want to talk about how he might know about Command’s love of record keeping.
“He was Corps. He can interpret human thought process and Command regulations for the tracking of data,” Da’shay announced and Tom inwardly groaned even though he tried to keep a neutral expression. He did, however, tighten his hand on his gun. If Hou was going to call planetary security to come and throw them in a little cell as spies, he was going to have the pleasure of shooting a few people first. He might even include Da’shay in that number.
Instead of reaching for a communications device, Hou nodded. “Then he can confirm,” he said, speaking noticeably slower. Tom was guessing that mean the genta was trying to include him in the conversation.
“Explain,” Da’shay told Tom in a voice that made it clear she wanted answers immediately. She held her whole body differently, and her voice was clipped, like a true genta’s. He looked at Hou and then at Da’shay. She was channeling Hou, changing because of how he expected her to be. Maybe that was a talent, being able to slide from one personality to another, but it did seem that the cost was too high if it meant she lost herself somewhere in the middle.
She looked at him, and the angle of
her shoulders changed, her back swayed and she brought a hand up to rest against his chest. “Can find myself now. Like a lighthouse from a children’s book, all white light cast into the darkness,” she whispered. Tom looked down at her and swallowed. She was strong enough to fight when most would have given up, but there was some vulnerable piece of her that was clinging to his light, and that scared him. Tom never had been good at being the trustworthy one. She brought her hand up to cup his cheek, and Tom opened his mouth without finding any way to say what he was thinking. She gave him a small smile before turning back toward Hou, her body shifting again. “Explain,” she ordered curtly a second time.
Tom took a deep breath and walked over to the vid and angled his body so he could look at the documents without putting his back to Hou.
“It’s an official arrest report,” Tom started, which was the obvious part. He frowned as he looked at the rest. The captain who had blown up the Kratos with that rigged crate of embryos had been arrested six days before meeting with them, which didn’t make sense at all. He should have still been in jail if this report was telling the truth. Tom enlarged the corner of the report, checking the file numbers and seals and even the language used where the arresting officer described how Captain Smyth had verbally harassed the Corps crew. While Tom might be wrong, this felt a lot like a real arrest report.
Tom cleared his throat which had gone dry. “According to this, Captain Smyth and the crew of the Reseda were picked up trying to land on Alsha because their papers didn’t match some new security seal.” The arresting officer would have opened the embryos. The fact they’d been genetically enhanced should have led to immediate disposal and arrest of everyone on the Reseda. Explosives would have gotten Captain Smyth twenty years on a penal moon, so him running around and offering the same crate to Ramsay six days later didn’t make any sense.
“Describe procedure in case of confiscation of illegal biologicals,” Da’shay prompted him.
“Command has been pushing real hard to get control over biologicals lately.” The fact was people got flat out touchy about the idea of eating food that had been tampered with by a genta—too many horror vids used that as the first step in some mass human extermination. “When the Corps finds paperwork that ain’t up to standard, they inspect every stick of cargo. Anything that breaks code, local or Corps code, is confiscated. Biologicals are inventoried so the lawyers can decide on the right charges against the crew and then a sample is taken for evidence. The rest is sent to an incinerator and destroyed. The equipment is then sterilized and held for a year before it’s put up for auction.” As far as Tom knew, there weren’t any exceptions for that, but then he was just a corporal, so he didn’t have the sort of law training that the others had. “We know the crate was rigged with explosives six days later when it blew up in our faces, but if those explosives had been there during this arrest, standard procedure is to secure the area and trigger the explosives on-site unless there’s a nuclear signature. The explosion is measured for the lawyers to use in the official charges.”
Da’shay tilted her head. “They violated procedure. They didn’t arrest Smyth or take Hou’s embryos and Hou’s merchandise blew up the Kratos six days later.” Hou didn’t answer, he just stared at the vid screen with the scattering of documents.
Another title caught his eye, and without asking permission, Tom pressed on the service file for the officer in charge of the Alsha arrest. Captain Lim Hatzis had two service decorations and three letters of reprimand, one for excessive force and two for failure to complete missions in a timely manner. He looked real average. But something wasn’t right. Tom flipped farther back in the records. His psyche eval was there. Tom looked at Hou, suspicious about how the man had gotten intel like this.
Command insisted that personnel files were held at highest security levels, but Command might not be as secure as they thought. Tom would tell them, only he figured Command was going to arrest him and Da’shay the second they set foot on Command controlled worlds. Da’shay would get exiled and he’d spend his life in a six by six foot box. It was funny how his life kept coming back to that possibility, as if it was some sort of fate.
He selected the link for training and read about young Lim Hatzis as a lieutenant. The man hadn’t come up from gun hand. He’d got a degree and bought a spot in officer training. Tom frowned as he looked at the training.
“Yellow flares though the teal,” Da’shay said to him, stroking his shoulder.
Tom sighed. He wasn’t going to be able to keep much from her. “He trained in Beystelle.”
Hou answered. “Earth Command controlled planet. 6,711 km diameter, escape velocity of 5 kilometers per second with a system escape velocity of 29 kilometers per second. Moderate use as trading base, but minimal buyers on-planet to make the trip profitable. Unimportant.”
“Maybe,” Tom said. Da’shay rested her hand on his chest and Tom just shook his head. He was going to have to execute himself as a traitor after this. “Rumor is that Beystelle is a little more important than it looks. A lot of funny things happen on that planet.”
“Unspecific,” Hou said with an unhappy frown. “Rumor is irrelevant. Communication without veracity or verification, provided without context, is meaningless.”
Da’shay gave a little hum. “Communication slipping free of control. Rumor is water dripping through bricks built up to hold the river. Whispers of truth swimming in the drop.”
Hou blinked at Da’shay, his head pulled back as though he’d seen something particularly offensive, but she looked back at him calmly. “Rumor is valuable if accepted as conditional,” she concluded. It suddenly occurred to Tom that he didn’t normally hear genta using the sort of metaphors that Da’shay did seem to love. They talked specifics, not poetry. “Relate the rumor.” Da’shay rested her hand on Tom’s chest and Tom focused on the job, surprised that he’d let himself lose track of events, even for a second.
“I’ve heard stories of people going missing on Beystelle, officers and crew called there who just never turned up again. And Corps trained there don’t always act like they should. They’ll call themselves gun hands, but then they’ll avoid the drinking and doxy houses. They’ll say they don’t want to bother with officer training, but then they’ll know things about the law that I figure come straight out of officer books because I sure don’t know them. There’s just always something off about them…they don’t move right or talk right to be who they say they are.”
“What is Tom’s conclusion from the given premises?” Da’shay asked.
Tom thought about that. There was a good chance he was about to make a fool of himself. “Seems like the rumors about that being a training site for the Information Corps might be right. IC have got to be trained somewhere and I’ve never known any other base to put out so many people who didn’t feel natural.”
“Does the slave possess skills at quantifying human psychology?”
Tom snorted, but before he could point out that he actually sucked at understanding people, Da’shay interrupted. “Excellent skills with threat assessment. Can predict aggressive and threatening behaviors with high degree of competence. Moderate levels of paranoia, but without delusional specifics he includes with this threat assessment.” She seemed to think for a second. “He is incompetent with social interactions, but this is not social.”
“Social interactions are irrelevant,” Hou said dismissively. “We shall tentatively accept the premise that Beystelle is a training site for IC. That increases the probability that Hatzis is an intelligence officer. Such a conclusion would suggest that Command engineered the first explosion. Use of human logic would then dictate Command set the second explosion as well.”
Tom didn’t like that conclusion, but he couldn’t find any way to poke a hole in it. Command should have confiscated the embryos and there was no way that one officer, not even a Commanding officer, could take a bribe to let Captain Smyth and his cargo slide. The whole crew would have to be dirty an
d Tom couldn’t see that happening. Most crew got moved around regularly. Him and Ramsay had only been together for so long because Tom’s record had enough reprimands that another ship wouldn’t take him. But if Hatzis had taken the cargo in as contraband and then let it back onto Smyth’s ship, explosives and all, it did seem as if Command had tried to kill them.
“Why?” Tom asked. Da’shay turned her back toward him and leaned. He slipped a hand around her waist and let his fingers splay on her stomach. He could feel her sigh, her whole body sagging toward him as she let him carry more of her weight.
Hou and Da’shay were both silent for a time and Tom could tell there was something not right in the room; however, he didn’t know what. He didn’t understand this room anymore than he understood the evidence staring him in the face. Da’shay had overstated things a bit by saying he could predict people’s aggressive behaviors because he couldn’t come up with one reason for Command doing something like this. Maybe Hou was lying and had made up the whole arrest report, but it looked genuine and the description of the arrest sounded like someone who’d been trained to make a report look pretty. Besides, Hou going to all the trouble to make such a good forgery implied that he was manipulating Tom and Da’shay and there just wasn’t one good reason for doing that.
“Possibilities,” Hou said as he headed back to his desk, giving Tom a real good shot at the back of his head, but he didn’t seem too worried about that. “One: Command wished to kill Captain Ramsay and the crew.”
“Counterevidence—Smyth attempted to send Ramsay away without the merchandise,” Da’shay argued, but she didn’t open her eyes. Her head was lying back onto Tom and she seemed to be on the verge of going to sleep. Tom kept his attention right on Hou since he wasn’t sure Da’shay would react fast enough if he turned on them.
“Two—Command wished to target smugglers.”