Except maybe engineering.
Preemas tilted his head just a little as he looked at Ibori. Ibori got the sense that Preemas was also watching the rest of the crew out of the corner of his eye, trying to figure out how far he could push them before they bolted from him.
Ibori wasn’t sure the crew supported the arrest. Preemas had to have seen the movement and discomfort as well, because his face softened just a little.
“All right,” Preemas said. “You’ve served this ship with honor, and now you want to honor one of our dead. I will allow that.”
Ibori let out a small breath. Preemas was coming to his senses after all.
“But,” Preemas said, “if you do not report to the brig after you have taken her to the med bay for disposal—”
Ibori winced at that word.
“—we will hunt you down and deal with you in whatever way we deem appropriate. Do you understand?”
Whatever way they feel appropriate. In other words, if they were in the middle of some kind of battle, they would kill him.
The captain just threatened to kill his navigator. A man who had never done anything wrong.
Ibori opened his mouth to tell the bridge crew that, and then stopped. They were smart. They could figure this out on their own. Or choose to ignore it, on their own.
Ibori didn’t answer Preemas. Instead, Ibori crouched beside Stephanos. The blood had stopped oozing. It was drying black against her skin. She looked sunken and broken. She really didn’t look human anymore.
He glanced at the open container. He really should close it, but he didn’t dare. Look at what happened to her when she tried.
He wasn’t that courageous. Or maybe, he wasn’t that kind of courageous. Because he was standing up to the captain of a ship he had agreed to serve on.
Standing up in a mutinous way.
Ibori looked at Colvin. “Will you help me get her on a gurney?”
Colvin shook her head slightly. She either didn’t want to be involved or she didn’t want to touch Stephanos’s body any more than Ibori wanted to touch the container.
He was going to have to bring one of the floating gurneys here, which made him queasy. More tech moving in the vicinity of the anacapa drive simply meant more things could go wrong.
“I will help,” said a voice he didn’t recognize.
He looked up. It took a moment for him to recognize India Romano. Her hair was lavender today. She always looked well put together. He noticed her, but she had never noticed him, which was probably good, considering she was married to one of the linguists below deck.
He had thought Romano was a linguist too. Then he saw the small badge attached to her sleeve, and realized she had been moved to a new position. She was security now.
Was this another ploy by Preemas? A way to make sure that Ibori actually went to the brig?
He hadn’t seen them consult, so he wasn’t sure how the ploy worked. Maybe Romano just took it upon herself to ensure Ibori’s compliance. Or maybe the offer of help had nothing to do with Preemas at all.
“Thank you,” he said. “I was worried about bringing the single gurney, because I didn’t want it interacting with the anacapa.”
Romano nodded, as if she had thought of that herself. “Yulia, get the regular gurney out of the storage closet. We’ll carry her to it.”
Ibori grimaced. He really didn’t want to touch Stephanos, but he was going to have no choice. He grabbed the gloves from his navigation console, and slipped them on.
As he did so, he saw Romano walk over to the anacapa container. She looked down on it. Her hair was standing up around her head, not a lot, but as if she had walked into a slight field filled with static.
“I don’t think you should touch it,” he said.
But even as he spoke, she bent over, grabbed the container lid with her bare hand, and slammed the container shut.
The bang echoed across the bridge. Ibori’s heart rate spiked so badly that he couldn’t catch his breath. A couple of people ducked. A few more took a step back.
Preemas’s hand had tightened around the laser pistol he had turned on Ibori.
“Wasn’t hard,” Romano said, turning away from the container. She wiped her hands on her pants. “You are all big babies.”
“Touching that killed Natalia,” Colvin said.
“Touching the stupid drive killed her,” Romano said. “My first lover was in anacapa training until they made her touch a drive. She went mad. Literally. Those things are dangerous, which is why we have them in containers.”
She took a few steps back to Stephanos’s body. Then Romano’s gaze met Ibori’s.
“No offense,” she said to him, “but you’re no expert on the drive. For all you know, just touching the drive after it had been used so many times is what killed her.”
“That’s not what she said.” Ibori spoke softly. He would never get her damaged face out of his mind, her hand clasping his, the urgency in her voice. “She told me as she was dying that it was the energy from the Scrapheap interacting with the drive.”
“Yeah, sure,” Romano said. “We’re all so reliable when we’re injured or dying. I’m sure her perceptions were spot on.”
Her tone, her lack of respect, her complete idiotic confidence made Ibori want to tell her to stay away from Stephanos’s body. But he didn’t.
He needed the help.
The gurney was out of the storage closet and floated a few steps up, near one of the large screens. That screen had been showing the Scrapheap, but was now dark.
Ibori had no idea when anyone (Preemas, probably) shut the screens down.
More denial, or whatever Preemas was doing. Ibori couldn’t quite figure it out.
But he didn’t have to. He needed to do this first, before he could do anything else.
He crouched beside Stephanos’s body.
“You ready?” he asked Romano.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll grab the feet.”
The feet. As if Stephanos was a thing, and not a person. Which, Ibori realized, she was now. Because Stephanos wasn’t in that body anymore. He felt a tightening in his throat, and made himself breathe, just to calm himself. It wasn’t working.
He just had to get through this.
He slipped his hands under her shoulders. The blood had oozed there and was already tacky against his fingers. Stephanos’s shoulders felt thinner than he would have expected. She had loomed large in his life—the person who knew how the anacapa drive worked, the woman who barked orders at him, the other person on the bridge he could share a smile with—so he never thought of her as small. And she had been.
And fragile.
Romano’s gaze met his. She didn’t seem disturbed by any of this at all. Her eyebrows went up, as if she was asking whether he was ready to do this.
He nodded.
“On three,” she said. “One…two…three.”
He lifted with his knees, not that the effort was all that necessary. Romano didn’t have Stephanos by the feet. Romano had gripped Stephanos’s thighs. Together Ibori and Romano carried Stephanos up the incline past several consoles to the floating gurney.
The gurney adjusted to the proper height, sliding under the body. Ibori let Stephanos go. His hands were covered with her blood, and it had dripped on the floor. He didn’t look at the spot she had fallen. He suspected it was one large blood stain right now.
“I’ll go with her,” he said to Romano, and then realized that Romano had already left him, going back to Preemas and the upcoming fight.
Ibori put his filthy hand on the gurney, gave it the verbal instruction to go to the morgue wing of the med bay, and it moved faster than he would have liked.
He had to walk quickly to keep up with it.
A few people, still near the stations, watched it go. But no one said anything. He had no idea what they were thinking.
He didn’t look back. He couldn’t.
But he had trouble looking at Stephanos too. The bo
dy no longer resembled the woman he had known.
She was dead, and as deeply as that disturbed him, another thought had entered his brain, one that disturbed him even more.
He had a hunch that she was only the first.
The Renegat
India Romano wiped her hands on a sanitizing cloth that Colvin handed her. There really hadn’t been goo from Stephanos’s body on Romano’s palms, but she cleaned her hands just in case. She’d made Ibori take the top part of the corpse because that’s where all the ick was. Who knew that death could happen so fast and so horribly? One mistake and—that.
Romano shuddered, wiped her hands a second time for good measure, and then she tossed the cloth aside. The bridge was already a mess; one more piece of garbage didn’t matter. She surveyed that mess for a minute—the horrid black pool of body fluids from Stephanos, sending out a waft of stink like the worst backed-up toilet. Suddenly, Romano wanted off the bridge. It was creepy. The abandoned consoles made the bridge look almost empty, even though a crowd of people had formed near the captain.
Also near the captain, more weapons than Romano had seen outside of weapons training classes in school. She knew how to use all of these, because they were personal weapons—standard-issue laser pistols, and a few rifles that everyone received training on before joining a ship in any kind of official capacity.
She didn’t recognize the tiny things—the hand-sized balls—but she figured they were explosives of some kind. She half-smiled to herself. As one of the security officers now, she should know how these things worked, and she didn’t.
Just more to learn.
She let out a small breath, forcing herself to focus on the crisis at hand, not the one she had just grumpily solved because no one else on this stupid bridge had been willing to step up and deal with Ibori and Stephanos.
Now that the gurney with the body accompanied by yet another living traitor had left the bridge, everyone could settle down to business. Including her.
She rejoined Captain Preemas, pushing her way through the other bridge crew members who had gathered around him. He had stacked a pile of weapons on top of a floating table. He was leaning on the arm of his captain’s chair, and looking at a tablet he had placed on its seat. She had no idea why he wasn’t using screens. She suspected that he was worried Crowe would hack into what the bridge crew was doing.
She wiped her hands on the back of her pants. Her hands felt like they were coated with something, although that was probably her imagination. She had never handled a dead body before.
Stephanos’s thighs had been thin, bony, and squishy. Her skin, through her pants, had still been warm, which Romano hadn’t expected. But Stephanos had been heavy, like a sack of rocks, and it hadn’t felt like Romano had been carrying a human being at all.
That thought had kept her calm while she was handling the corpse, but clearly she was bugged by it, or she wouldn’t keep wiping her hands.
But that wasn’t the only thing that bothered her about her hands. They were tingling. Her whole body was tingling on some low level. The air felt alive.
She had no idea if the tingling had gotten worse when she grabbed the container lid and slammed it shut or if everyone was experiencing this kind of tingling.
She wanted to ask, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
Although she was irked that she hadn’t gotten any kudos for touching that container lid. She was still pissed at Ibori for being a baby about handling the anacapa drive container; she was pissed at Crowe for putting them all in this situation; and she was pissed at her wife for continually pinging her in their shared link.
Romano had told her that there was a situation on the bridge, and Romano would talk to her later. Romano repeated that message twice after that, and then, finally, she had cut the link to Serpell.
Serpell had been difficult since Romano switched from linguist to security officer. Apparently Serpell hadn’t cared that Romano was happier in this position.
Their relationship was doomed; Serpell just didn’t know it yet. And Romano didn’t have the guts to tell her. Not yet. Besides, Romano didn’t want to be stuck on a ship with an ex. Better to avoid the actual wife, than exacerbate things by confronting Serpell about the failure of the relationship and then having to see her every single day.
“At least a dozen others have weapons that we’ll be able to use,” Preemas was saying. He seemed a little more animated than usual. The man was one of those fidgeters, always moving. But today, he was moving even more, clearly unable to stay still.
Romano didn’t blame him. He had just been betrayed by the person he trusted the most. Crowe had been planning to overthrow Preemas for weeks, maybe since before he got on the ship.
It had been a brilliant plan, too, as far as Romano could see. Crowe had waited until they were as far from the Fleet as they could get, and then he seized the ship. What could the Fleet do, after all? Send another ship? They’d already filled this one with the dregs of the Fleet. It would take them weeks, maybe months, to fill another ship like this.
Not that anyone could send a message back to the Fleet anyway.
Preemas had explained all of this to the team—how Crowe had tampered with everything, then made it seem like he was a good guy so Preemas promoted him. (He fooled me, Preemas said. I’m man enough to admit that. He fooled me just like he fooled you all.)
Crowe had used all of his access to cut off communications with the Fleet, make sure that Preemas’s secondary command center had been shut down, and had isolated the bridge.
Preemas was doing everything he could to find a way to get information that Crowe couldn’t access. Romano didn’t know a lot about systems, but she knew that Preemas did, and she had to trust him on this.
“The problem is that we don’t have engineers,” Preemas was saying. “Crowe has polluted them all. Even the ones who left engineering aren’t really getting involved. I’ve confined them to quarters. I’ve already sent someone to confiscate their weapons, but we don’t have time to wait for extras.”
No one else spoke. Romano wiped her hands again, hating how they felt. It was almost as if they were going numb.
She glanced at her right hand, her dominant hand. It looked paler than usual. The blood vessels were visible through the skin, something she’d seen on people with lighter skin, but never on her hands before.
“Are we boring you, India?” Preemas snapped.
She raised her head and dropped her hand at the same time. “No, sir. It’s just—.” She interrupted herself, deciding not to tell him what was happening after all. He probably wouldn’t care, for that matter. “Um, it’s just that I’m ready to go after the bastards now, sir.”
Preemas’s frown changed to a grin. He laughed. “Good point, India,” he said. “The more we talk, the more time they have to figure out how to keep hold of the ship.”
He waved a hand at Fernando Oshie, who had started acting as his second in command. “Hand out the pistols. Who here has been trained on laser rifles?”
Titus M’Ghan and Jorja Lakinas raised their hands.
Preemas nodded and handed them each a rifle. “We’ll use the rest of them,” he said, “only if we need them. People who know how to use them, but haven’t been trained, take the others. If I give the command, we’ll just fire randomly.”
Romano shuddered. She wasn’t sure what caused that. She’d like to blame the tingling. But the idea that people like her who only knew how to use the rifles in theory actually using the rifles made her nervous.
But…this was the situation that Crowe had put them all in. She would do what she had to do.
Preemas picked up one of the small round things. “These are charges that we usually use planetside. They have a small explosive power, enough to open doors and blast through walls. It’s risky to use them on a ship, but I see no other way to get into engineering.”
Romano stood very still. Now she knew that the shot of nerves that ran through her had
nothing to do with the growing tingling feeling throughout her body. The idea of blowing anything up on a ship in space terrified her.
Yulia Colvin shot Romano a glance. Colvin looked terrified. Lakinas’s lips thinned, and she clutched her rifle tighter.
“The great thing about these charges,” Preemas was saying, apparently not noticing the growing unease in the people around him (or not caring), “is that they can be controlled. We change the force and the power of them. Fernando and I have both used them before. We will set them outside of engineering, and blow open the doors before we storm the place.”
He raised his head, then met everyone’s eyes. When his gaze locked on to Romano’s, she felt her breath catch. It was as though he could see all her doubts and fears, and he felt the same level of contempt for them that she had felt for Ibori.
She made herself give him what she hoped was a confident half smile and a nod.
She was ready, even though it would be hard.
“This is a straightforward assault on the sealed room. We blow the door, we enter, and we shoot,” Preemas said. “Because it’s engineering, though, we have to be careful where we aim. If you’re not an accurate shot, then reserve your firepower until I give the order. We want to hit the mutineers, not the equipment around them. Is that clear?”
A shootout in engineering. Clear. Yeah, it was clear. It was clearly terrifying.
But they were at a stalemate and someone had to do something, or Crowe would hurt them all worse.
She wasn’t quite sure what the worse was, but that wasn’t her concern. Preemas knew Crowe. He knew what Crowe wanted, and why Crowe took over the ship. And Preemas felt it was enough of a threat to everyone that he had to take drastic action.
That was good enough for Romano.
When Preemas’s gaze met hers this time, she had a half smile plastered on her face. His gaze moved from hers quickly this time because he couldn’t see her fear.
Which was good because her fear was irrelevant.
The Renegat Page 58