She was tired and frustrated with his shortsightedness. Didn’t he understand how much trouble he was in? She’d thrown the Minoan possibility out to scare him, but he continued to focus on Abram.
“Look, I recommend you turn yourself in willingly to Pilgrimage authorities and cooperate with them. It’s the right thing to do, both morally and jurisdictionally, and when they learn more about Abram, they might be lenient.”
“Certainly, Major. If you think it’s best.” His response was subdued.
She was on dock approach before she could make contact with the Pilgrimage’s control deck. Luckily, the readings from her implant, as well as Tahir’s, indicated they wouldn’t require medical treatement. She verified this by passing their dosimeter readings to the Pilgrimage.
Before she released Tahir from the compartment, she told him the third crew member, Muse, was resting. She also warned him about the crowd waiting dockside. She’d seen parts of the scene from the ship’s cam-eye, but it wasn’t until they were standing at the top of the ramp that they both realized the extent of Tahir’s difficulties.
Out of cam-eye range, to the right, stood a flotilla of Minoans. She’d never seen so many guardians with both an emissary and a warrior. She sharply drew her breath. I guess I wasn’t bullshitting when I told Tahir the Minoans would be interested. Generational crew members clustered in the center of the crowd surrounding the ramp and to the left, she saw ranks of AFCAW and Terran Space Forces. Three stun rifles were ready and aimed at Tahir.
The dock was strangely quiet. There was no motion, except for the Minoans’ robes drifting about their bodies. She saw Commander Meredith Pilgrimage, in uniform, standing at the bottom of the ramp. She prodded Tahir forward and pointed to Meredith with her chin.
She walked behind him down the ramp, their boots clunking dully. Tahir and Meredith spoke so quietly she couldn’t hear them, but she figured Tahir was asking to be separated from all other isolationists. Meredith nodded and gestured to the Minoans. To her surprise, two guardians moved forward to take Tahir away.
Suddenly, the quiet broke into ragged cheers. The crowd surged toward her and the organized ranks dispersed. Matt reached her first. He hugged her, nearly crushing the breath out of her lungs.
“Are you all right?” he said in her ear.
“I’m great, and the ship is fine.” She was breathless, perhaps because of the bear hug, perhaps because his arms were still around her.
Matt glanced up the ramp. He squeezed her again, quickly, before running up the ramp to his first true love, probably going to the control deck to check on ship functions. She smiled; everything was getting back to normal.
There were others about her now, civilians and military, Autonomist and Terran, wishing her well, asking questions, slapping her on the back.
Owen stood in front of her. His colonel’s black and blue uniform appeared pressed and clean, but he looked tired. When had he started to look so old? He was flanked by other AFCAW uniforms, perhaps, but she was getting tunnel vision. With shaking fingers, she reached into her jacket’s inner pocket and handed him Dokos’s name tag.
“She was executed. She died bravely.” When Owen’s warm hand closed over hers, she realized how cold her extremities were.
“Are you okay, Major?” Owen looked strange. He was still gripping her hand.
She was exhausted, running on adrenaline and nothing else. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw tall shadows and flinched. The Minoan emissary and warrior were focused intently upon her, and moving inexorably closer.
“You need food and rest,” someone said in her ear. Owen? Her vision was going gray.
“Has Ariane woken yet?” David Ray asked.
“No. Colonel Edones said this is normal.” Matt grimaced. He always felt a bad taste on his tongue whenever he mentioned Edones. “They pump nutrients into her and let her rest. Then she eventually wakes up—it has to do with her metabolism, supposedly.”
David Ray nodded, but Dr. Lee Pilgrimage raised her eyebrows. Perhaps this vague description sounded as suspicious to her as it did to Matt. Holding firmly on to David Ray’s hand, Lee was sitting in a slanted hospital bed. Broken bones were more serious for generational crew, particularly at her age, than for grav-huggers, and she was resting from the bone-stim. She’d fared better than Allison, her technician, who’d died instantly from a broken neck.
“I meet the strangest people hanging around outside Ari’s room waiting for her to wake,” Matt added. “In particular, Warrior Commander. “What’s going on there, do you suppose?”
“I suspect the Minoans are less upset with the Terrans’ losing a weapon than they are with Ariane sending the TD wave into N-space.” David Ray clasped Lee’s hand in both of his, looking down. “I’m thinking of taking a hiatus to study what the Minoans are doing here in G- 145—they’ve been acting strangely ever since this system opened.”
“A hiatus?” Lee looked startled. In shipspeak, that meant David Ray was taking a vacation from his duties on the Pilgrimage, perhaps preparing to opt off. “How are you going to get honest work in the meantime, David Ray?”
“He’s going to be working for a small business,” Matt said. “Namely, Aether Exploration.”
“That’s if I can handle the pay cut.” David Ray winked. “Besides, I’ve heard a rumor the Minoans may attempt to use the Pilgrimage justice system to charge negligence, treaty violation, you name it. Even Terran State Princes want legal consultants, when facing Minoans.”
David Ray and Lee stared at each other with we-have-to-talk looks. Lee’s smile was brilliant. Matt looked away, a little envious, feeling like an interloper. He stood up.
“I’ve got to go. I offered to buy Diana Oleander a drink. Seems like the least I could do, considering she saved our lives.”
“She’s a bright young lady. With the advantage that she doesn’t crew for you,” David Ray added. Generational crews could be even pickier than the military about avoiding romance in the workplace, particularly because space was such a dangerous workplace.
“Beautiful too.” Lee’s eyes glinted wickedly as she watched Matt. “Lovely oval eyes and chestnut hair. With a complexion that makes us old ladies envious, don’t you think?”
“Er—yes. S’pose so. Better get going.” Matt retreated from the matchmaking environment as fast as he could.
When he was alone in the corridor, he ran his fingers through his short hair, remembering how Lieutenant Oleander had taken pity and befriended him. He’d been the only civilian on the Bright Crescent, unwelcome, and worried about Ari. Diana Oleander had made his tense sojourn pass more easily.
I must have crashed. Ariane woke up in a bed in the Pilgrimage’s clinic. To her right, she saw the shelter area, where they’d put bunks for the survivors who straggled in to get protection from the radiation. She closed her eyes.
“Major Kedros?”
She yawned and turned her head, running her fingers through her hair. A staff sergeant in green ops coveralls, with medical insignia, stood in the doorway.
“I’m not ‘Major,’ right now.”
“Yes, you are.” The sergeant smiled slightly and handed her a slate. “Colonel Edones put you on active-duty orders. I’ll need your signature before I can release you from medical observation.”
Ariane took the slate and looked at the effective date-time stamp. Was this to cover Edones’s ass, or hers? Then she realized that AFCAW would have covered her medical bills, if she’d required more serious treatment. He was being more considerate than she gave him credit for—but it also meant that he had control over any sort of Intelligence data she might have gleaned in this period. So perhaps this action wasn’t altruistic after all. It didn’t matter; these emergency recall orders went into effect regardless of her opinion. She thumbed the slate and handed it back to the woman.
“You’re free to go whenever you like, Major.” She smiled and hesitated, drifting farther into the room. “By the way, as one of the three thousand surv
ivors in this system—thank you. We all appreciate what you did.”
“Oh. You’re welcome.” Ariane expected that Terra and CAW would have squelched all news of a “loose TD weapon”—but even the Directorate of Intelligence and yes, even Owen, were powerless in the face of rumor and gossip.
“And perhaps you should know,” continued the sergeant, looking quickly out the door. “That creepy Minoan in black stops by three times a shift to see if you can be interviewed. You’ve got about an hour before it comes by again.”
Ariane didn’t have to be warned twice. There was one thing on her mind now, and she knew the Pilgrimage III well enough to find it. One deck up and she entered the crew lounge and bar. It was crowded, but with everybody hunkering behind anything with a magnetosphere right now, she wasn’t surprised.
Two walls showed multiple feeds; a third wall had the bar. Across the lounge, Matt sat with the young woman lieutenant, whose name she couldn’t remember, from the Bright Crescent. She took a step toward their table, but paused, feeling like she was intruding. Matt looked young and unscarred, making her feel bitter and scarred inside. He deserved someone more like himself: fundamentally happy, optimistic, and with nothing to hide. Ariane turned away from the couple.
“Ariane! Good to see you up and walking.” Hal, the loadmaster she’d met on Beta Priamos Station, waved her over.
“Hal? What are you doing here?”
“We brought in your Sergeant Joyce. We loaded the Golden Bull with tons of extra shielding, making it the most expensive cargo run in my life. But we had to do it, to get him to medical support.”
“Is he that bad?” Her spirits fell and her stomach felt hollow. “Maybe I should go see him.”
“He can’t have visitors. He’s barely hanging on, but the Pilgrimage has good facilities and they’re hopeful he’ll pull through, provided he can accept his own vat-grown organs.”
“He can.” Ariane didn’t explain why she knew this. She glanced over her shoulder. Matt and his companion—name of Oleander, she remembered—were deep in conversation.
“So how ’bout a beer?” Hal asked, gesturing to the bar seat next to him. “I’ll buy the first round.”
Ariane watched Lieutenant Oleander lean forward and rest her hand on Matt’s forearm. They were both laughing. She looked around the rest of the room. People were enjoying themselves, eating and drinking away the knowledge they’d come close to death. They’d felt the dank breath that usually chased them only in their dreams, and they wanted to forget it. Some knew just how close their sun had come to going nova, while others merely thought they’d escaped a madman’s plan for an abysmal future. She cocked her head.
“What are you doing?” Hal’s eyes narrowed.
“Listening.”
“For what?”
She spent another moment absorbing the babble. If Major Tafani’s voice was expressing disapproval inside her head, she couldn’t hear him. Likewise, no ghosts whispered.
“Nothing.” She smiled, and reached for the beer that had appeared as if by magic in front of her. “Nothing at all.”
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
Vigilante Page 32