The knock came as he was reviewing the log entry he’d made on the incidents on Starlight and what he’d learned from interrogating Elias during their second excursion to recover the bodies of Billy and Preston.
Tapping the screen, he copied his files to a thinpad so he could take it with him. The door opened without a knock and he glanced up at two massive FleetCom security officers standing outside his door. Nuko stood behind them, almost eclipsed by their bulk. She’d obviously not wanted to let them roam the decks without an escort.
“Captain Ethan Walker?” the taller of the two officers asked.
“That’s me,” he said as he stood up.
“Captain MacKenna has sent us to bring you to the Magellan to answer some questions regarding your actions over the last several days,” he said.
“Of course,” he said. “Am I being bound?”
“At this point that would be for Captain MacKenna to decide, sir,” he said. “We’re only to escort you to the ship so you can explain your side of things.”
“And if I refuse,” he said, not considering that possibility, but only hoping to gage how serious this was. He knew it was bad, but how far it was over that threshold into total foobed territory, was still far from certain.
“Honestly, sir, she didn’t make it sound like it was an invitation,” the second officer said. “I don’t believe this is a formal matter, but I think she was willing to make it one if necessary. She doesn’t like having her orders disobeyed and I believe that is what they have told her you’ve done.”
Walker nodded. “Not without reason, but that probably doesn’t matter.”
“Once again sir, that is for Captain MacKenna to determine,” the taller officer said. He stepped to the side and gestured down the corridor. “Please sir, after you.”
Picking up the thinpad from his desk, he slipped it into the pocket of his duty uniform and looked around his wardroom. For some reason it felt like it was his last time here. Pulling the door closed behind him, he headed toward the lift.
Nuko dropped in beside him and in a low voice said, “Leigh is acting like this is a done deal. She’s giving orders like she owns the ship.”
“She does,” he said. “Don’t cause problems for her. If they suspend my license, you’ll have to pilot for her until they get us to a port of call.”
“Rene and I won’t serve under her,” Nuko said.
“If it comes to that, just get the Olympus Dawn home in one piece,” he said. “After that, you can do what you have to, but I want you to know I won’t give up without pushing this as far as I can. I’m sure this is just the beginning.”
As the lift dropped through the mid-deck, he could see they’d already transferred the children to the Magellan and Rene was working with Pruitt to get the room restored to its usual condition. Things looked surprisingly normal considering the chaos that was everywhere only a few hours ago. Kaycee was conspicuously absent. She’s probably aboard the Magellan with her patients, he realized.
When they got to the hangar level Walker was startled to see that they turned and headed down to the cargo stanchion airlock. “You didn’t use the hangar deck?”
“No, sir,” the second officer said. “We had to use a fast skiff, and it was too big to park inside. They have the small shuttles involved in surface operations.”
“That was quick,” he said.
“Yes sir, we were called off of a relief mission to investigate the situation here,” the officer said as the hatch irised open and they stepped into the skiff. “Cap’n MacKenna wants to get this done and us back on our other duty no later than yesterday.”
“Got it,” he said, taking a seat in the last row of the passenger cabin. Might as well get used to the back of the bus, he thought.
Looking around, he found it odd how new everything looked. But he knew the Magellan was one of the latest ships to be commissioned so everything would actually be new. The skiff was a shockingly clean little ship. From the inside, it looked like it was one of the Razor Class high-speed shuttles that were flying all over Zone One. It would have seated close to thirty passengers and was ideal for interplanetary commutes. Blisteringly fast, it could make the jump between planets in the solar system in under an hour. Here, it was far too big, and too fast, to be ferrying passengers between vessels parked together.
Walker listened to the mooring clamps disengage and could hear the primary drive coils power up. And then they shut down less than a second later. “Not much good for sightseeing is it?” he said, chuckling as he glanced out the window in time to see the Magellan’s landing deck eclipse the view of Shadetree.
Neither of the officers escorting him had bothered to sit down for the transfer between ships. The second officer held out his arm toward the back hatch. “Welcome to the Magellan,” he said as they marched out onto the landing deck.
It took longer to get to the command deck aboard the ship than it took to get from his quarters on the Olympus Dawn all the way to the multicruiser. He felt like a small town dorkel in the big city as they rode something the two officers called a jetlift. It was an enclosed capsule that accelerated so abruptly that his knees almost buckled. Thirty seconds later, it deposited them somewhere near the ConDeck.
“How big is this thing?” Ethan asked as they marched past rows of unmarked doorways.
“It’s an upper end E-Class keel,” the second officer said. “Only thing bigger in the fleet was the Old Armstrong before they converted it to a station.”
They stopped at a door that looked like any other door they’d passed, and the first officer rapped on it.
“Enter,” a voice said from inside. Walker recognized it as Captain MacKenna’s.
The door slid to the side, and the officer stepped in. “Captain Ethan Walker to see you,” he said. When Walker had stepped in behind him, he backed politely out of the room.
“Come in and sit down Captain,” Colleen MacKenna said. She was dressed in her casual FleetCom blues and had her back to him. When she turned around, she had two glasses in her hands. She held one out to him. “Long week, eh?” She smiled sadly and nodded toward the sitting area in her ready room.
“Today,” he said, smiling and taking the offered drink. It looked and smelled like scotch. “The rest of the week was worse.”
She took a seat and waited for him to sit across from her. He set his drink on the table and tried to lean back and look as comfortable as he could, considering he was talking to the person who was likely to shut him down.
She stared at him for several seconds before she glanced at the glass in front of him. “Not a drinker?”
“Actually, I am when I have reason to be,” he said.
“And those reasons would be?”
“Celebration or suffering,” he said.
“Fair enough,” she said. She set her drink down and leaned forward, frowning. “When we’re done here, chances are you will be drinking.”
“I expect it won’t be because I’m happy about things.”
She shrugged. “Probably not. Unless you’ve got extraordinary reasons for risking your crew to the point where two of them are dead, I don’t think there’s any way I can leave you without some consequence.”
“Here are my log entries regarding what I did and why,” he said, pulling the thinpad out and handing it to her.
She took it from him and set it on the table beside her drink. “I’d prefer to hear about it from you directly,” she said. “You can’t question a log file.”
He nodded.
“Your Triple-C has made some pretty serious allegations against you. I’m sure you know that.”
Again he nodded.
“Do you have anything to say about that?”
“Leigh Salazar is a fair woman. I may disagree with her interpretation of my motivations, but I’m sure she got the facts straight. I don’t know how I can address that other than to say the situation was a mystery when we got here and I was trying to do my job.”
; “She did say that,” MacKenna said. “She’s pointed out several places where she thinks you violated the terms of your contract with Cochrane Space Logistics and you put, not just your ship, but your payload in danger.”
“That may have resulted from my actions, but it was never my intent,” he said.
“I do believe you on that,” she said. “And fortunately for you, that’s a civil matter between you and your employer.”
“I am a Contracted Lease Captain,” he said. “CSL brokers loads and holds title on my ship, but I don’t work for them as an employee.”
“That might matter to some legal advisor somewhere,” she said. “It doesn’t affect what I have to deal with. I need to decide if it looks like it was criminal negligence that resulted in the loss of your crewmen. Right now I don’t know enough to make a determination.”
“I understand. My question to you would be what would make it criminal versus civil?”
“It’s not civil in either case, actually. It is rather willful commission of a crime or simple neglect.”
“Or an accident?”
“‘Accident’ is a sloppy word, Captain,” she said. “Out here in the dark, an accident is a matter of not doing the job right. Not paying attention can, get a person killed.”
“I agree,” he said. “So how would you have me address that? I was in the middle of trying to rescue passengers who had gone down to the surface without authorization when we discovered the children trapped in the medical center. There was no way I could have anticipated either of those possibilities.”
She leaned back again and stared at him for almost a minute. “The situation involving the children is potentially something you could not have anticipated, but the reason your passengers escaped your control is something you should have prevented. If that hadn’t happened you never would have been down there.”
“CSL limits my crew to two cargo handlers,” he said. “They require both positions to have security training. It’s only because I specialize in deep runs and there’s a problem with piracy beyond the 250 light year line, that they supply any security at all. It’s impossible to watch two people effectively round the clock, with only two guards.”
She stroked her chin and resumed staring. Finally she nodded. “That might be a liability defense for you, but you’ll have to take that up with CSL when you get home,” she said. “Now let’s talk about what happened, after they got away.”
“We tried to retrieve the shuttle they had stolen by teleoperation, but Elias Pruitt had disabled the system-link. They left us no choice but to pursue them physically. I put together an excursion team and we went down to the surface.”
“In direct defiance of my orders,” she said, her eyes showing she didn’t appreciate that disobedience in a very personal way.
“Yes Ma’am,” he said. “We didn’t expect it to take long. My AA has a Gendyne 6000 with a sensor kit. It should have been fairly quick to track them and get them back on the ship. At that point you were only a few hours from arriving and we wanted to have the mess cleaned up before you got here.”
“Like it never even happened?” she asked, frowning. “That doesn’t make it any less a violation of my instructions to you.”
“I understand that,” he said. “I also know it was a matter of circumstance that allowed us to find the children. It was trying to rescue the children that led to my crew members setting off the trap that killed them.” He swallowed hard and reached out to pick up his glass.
“We’re looking at that right now,” she said. “Why do you say it was a trap?”
“Billy … Crewman Chandler, was still alive when we got to him.” He blinked several times and took a drink of the scotch. “He reported that they recognized it as a trap, but couldn’t get away before it went off.”
“Who would have set up a trap in a hospital?” she asked.
“I have no clue,” he said.
“Did you see any evidence of this trap?” she challenged.
He shook his head. “Honestly, I didn’t go back and try to do a forensic analysis of the scene. I don’t have the tools or the skill for that. The only person on my crew that might have, died in the explosion too.”
“Do you feel there is any reason to believe there may be more of these traps down there?” she asked, leaning forward and picking up his thinpad from the table. She slipped it into her breast pocket.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s possible that whoever did it was trying to protect the children.”
“Protect the children from what?”
“Again, I don’t know,” he said. “From whatever took the rest of the population out. Although we didn’t reach the emergency shelters we believed to be the objective of our passengers, they did. When I talked to Pruitt on the way back down to recover my lost crewmen’s remains he told me what they had discovered.”
She nodded and studied him. Something in her eyes had changed, and he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw.
“I will talk to them about what they discovered down there, too,” she said. Picking up her glass, she slammed the scotch back in a single gulp and stood up.
She walked across toward the door before he realized the interview was finished. He followed her out into the hall. The two officers were still waiting.
“I’ll alert my e-teams to watch out for signs of improvised explosive devices,” she said, sending one of the guards off with a wave of her hand. Her eyes told him she was far from convinced.
“In the meantime, consider that because of the fatalities on your crew, your Shipmaster certificate is suspended until a formal enquiry can be conducted. I am not ordering you charged because of the mitigating circumstances of the children you rescued. I will pass the orders to your first officer that she is to make way back to your cargo’s point of origin, immediately after you return to your ship.”
“Our point of origin was Armstrong Station in Zone One,” he said. “You’re not sending us to the nearest hub?”
She shook her head. “Dr. Caldwell has already explained the nature of the payload you’re carrying and has insisted that it could not be adequately secured except at Armstrong. She will accompany it there.”
“Yes Ma’am,” he said.
“I suspect that before you get back, you will have orders from CSL regarding what actions they wish to take. I’m sure they will want to do a full investigation before they consider further actions on your license.”
He nodded. “I expect so.”
She offered her hand. “Good luck to you Mister Walker. If it’s any consolation, I think you were dealt a frakking shitty hand. But life in the dark sometimes does that.”
Chapter Twenty:
Ethan stood at the bow window of the mid-deck lounge staring out at the night side of Starlight. The soft red glow of reflected light from Shadetree hinted at blood and he shivered as he closed his eyes against the memories. The guards had escorted him back to the docking stanchion and he’d made his way as far as the lounge before Her Highness, the Acting Captain Salazar, had come over the comm and announced that they would make way in under an hour.
When he’d asked, Marti had confirmed that MacKenna had given Leigh administrative command of the Olympus Dawn until they returned to CSL headquarters at Lunar L-2. That wasn’t the same thing as a real captaincy since she didn’t carry the operational qualifications, but Nuko could run the ship under her directions. It also meant that she couldn’t have him arrested or otherwise confined for the duration of the return flight. Although he doubted he’d spend much of his time anywhere but in his quarters.
He tried not to think about the routine things that were going on. How Rene was doing a final preflight on the engines. How Nuko was doing the calculations for their flight path. How Angel and Billy were … He stopped himself. How Angel alone was doing a deck by deck walkabout to make sure everything was stowed and ready.
MedBay would sit dark. Empty. He glanced over his shoulder at the door and was surprised t
o see it standing open and the lights on. He should have known better than to look, and it drove a knife into him.
“All hands, prepare for maneuvers,” Nuko said over the com.
The stars swung, carrying Starlight around and below them as the almost fully illuminated face of Shadetree filled the window for a brief moment. He watched as they arced up and over the north pole of the scorched desert world and the view of open space spread out in front of him. Deep space was home, but it felt wrong to be seeing this from anywhere but the ConDeck.
He rested his forehead against the inner surface of the window and felt the vibration of the engines as they accelerated. Even that feeling, which was so familiar to him, felt alien from the mid-deck. The stars in front of the ship blue-shifted as they pushed the space normal limit for the system. As they climbed toward half light speed, he recognized the illusion of brightness when his eyes perceived the blue tinge as a slight change in intensity.
A motion in the light reflected from the window distracted him and he changed his focus without turning.
Someone was walking up behind him. Kaycee.
He shook his head without turning. “I have nothing to say to you.”
She stood there for several minutes in silence before she reached toward him. He knew she meant it to be comforting, but seeing her motion, he turned and walked away without speaking.
Somewhere around day four of their return flight, Ethan could stay in his quarters no longer. Late into thirdshift he walked around the ship. Everyone would be asleep except Marti, and the computer left him to his silence. Without thinking he took the lift toward the ConDeck, but the gate refused to open when the platform stopped.
“Of course, I’m locked out,” he whispered.
“Would you like access?” Marti offered. He was sure it violated every rule that Salazar had imposed for the AA to even suggest that possibility.
He shook his head.
Yes he wanted it, but he knew it would only make things worse. Instead he punched the down button and ended up on the mid-deck again.
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