Esmay Suiza had done her best to clean
up before reporting as ordered to the admiral aboard her flagship, but the mutiny and the
following battle had left her little time. She had showered, and run her uniform through
the cycler, but it wasn't her dress uniform-- the fight aboard Despite had put
holes through interior bulkheads and started innumerable small fires, including one in the
junior officers' storage compartment. She herself, though clean, had not slept well in . .
. however many days it had been. She knew her eyes were bloodshot and sticky with fatigue;
her hands trembled. She had the stomach-clenching feeling that her best wasn't good
enough.
Admiral Serrano looked like an older
edition of Captain Serrano, the same compact trim frame, the same bronze skin. Here the
dark hair was streaked silver, and a few lines marked the broad forehead, but she gave an
impression of crackling energy held just in check.
"Lieutenant Junior Grade Suiza
reporting, sir." At least her voice didn't shake. Those few days of command had
ironed out the uneasy flutter she used to struggle against.
"Have a seat, Lieutenant." The
admiral had no expression Esmay could read. She sat in the appointed chair, glad that her
knees held and she made it a controlled descent. When she was down safely, the admiral
nodded, and went on. "I have reviewed your summary of events aboard Despite.
It seems to have been a very . . . difficult . . . time."
"Yes, sir." That was safe. In a
world of danger, that was always safe; so she had been taught in the Academy and her first
ship postings. But her memory reminded her that it wasn't always true, that a "Yes,
sir," to Captain Hearne had been treason, and a "Yes, sir," to Major Dovir
had been mutiny.
"You do understand, Lieutenant, that
it is mandatory for all officers participating in a mutiny to stand before a court to
justify their actions?" That in a voice almost gentle, as if she were a child. She
would never be a child again.
"Yes, sir," she said, grateful
for the gentleness even though she knew it would do her no lasting good. "We--I--have
to take responsibility."
"That's right. And you, because you
are the senior surviving officer, and the one who ended up in command of the ship, will
bear the brunt of this investigation and the court." The admiral paused, looking at
her with that quiet, expressionless face; Esmay felt cold inside. They had to have a
scapegoat, is that what it meant? She would be to blame for the whole thing, even though
she hadn't even known, at first--even though the senior officers- -now dead--had tried to
keep the youngsters out of it? Panic filled in a quick sketch of her future: dismissed,
disgraced, thrown out of Fleet and forced to return home. She wanted to argue that it
wasn't fair, but she knew better. Fairness wasn't the issue here. The survival of ships,
which depended on the absolute obedience of all to the captain . . . that was the issue.
"I understand," she said
finally. She almost understood.
"I won't tell you that such a court
is merely a formality, even in a case like this," the admiral said. "A court is
never a mere formality. Things always come out in courts to the detriment of everyone
concerned--things that might not matter ordinarily. But in this case, I don't want you to
panic. It is clear from your report, and that of other personnel--" Which, Esmay
hoped, might mean the admiral's niece, "--that you did not instigate the mutiny, and
that there is a reasonable probability that the mutiny will be held to be justified."
The knot in Esmay's stomach loosened slightly. "Obviously, it is necessary to remove
you from command of Despite."
Esmay felt her face heating, more relief
than embarrassment. She was so tired of having to figure out how to ask the senior NCOs
what to do next without violating protocol. "Of course, sir," she said, with a
little more enthusiasm than she meant to show. The admiral actually smiled now.
"Frankly, I'm surprised that a Jig
could take over Despite and handle her in battle- -let alone get off the decisive
shot. That was good work, Lieutenant."
"Thank you, sir." She felt
herself going even redder, and embarrassment overcame reticence. "Actually, it was
the crew--'specially Master Chief Vesec--they knew what to do."
"They always do," the admiral
said. "But you had the sense to let them, and the guts to come back. You're young;
you made mistakes of course--" Esmay thought of their first attempt to join the
fight, the way she'd insisted on too high an insertion velocity and forced them to blow
past. She hadn't known then about the glitch in the nav computer, but that was no excuse.
The admiral went on, recapturing her attention. "But I believe you have the root of
the matter in you. Stand your court, take your medicine, whatever it is, and--good luck to
you, Lieutenant Suiza." The admiral stood; Esmay scrambled up to shake the hand
extended to her. She was being dismissed; she didn't know where she was going or what
would happen next, but--but she felt a warm glow where the cold knot had been.
As the escort outside made clear, where
she was going was a quarantined section of officers' country on the flagship. Peli and the
few other junior officers were already there, stowing their duffel in the lockers and
looking glum.
"Well, she didn't eat you
alive," Peli said. "I suppose my turn's coming. What's she like?"
"A Serrano," Esmay said. That
should be enough; she wasn't about to discuss an admiral's character on board a ship.
"There's a court coming--but you know that." They had not so much talked about
it, as touched the subject and flinched away.
"At the moment," Peli said,
"I'm just as glad you had the seniority and not me. Though we're all in
trouble."
She had been glad to lay down command, but
just for a moment she wanted it back, so she could tell Peli to be quiet. And so she would
have something to do. It took only a minute or two to stow her own meager duffel in the
compartment she'd been assigned, and only another to wonder how much the officer evicted
from it would resent having to double up with someone else. Then she was faced with blank
walls--or an empty passage- -or the cluster of fellow mutineers in the tiny wardroom which
was all the common space they would have until the admiral decreed otherwise. Esmay lay
back on her bunk and wished she could turn off the relentless playback in her head, that
kept showing her the same gruesome scenes over and over and over. Why did they seem worse
each time?
"Of course they're listening,"
Peli said. Esmay paused in the wardroom entrance; four of the others were there, listening
to Peli. He looked up, his glance including her in the conversation. "We have to
assume they're monitoring everything we say and do."
"That's standard," Esmay said.
"Even in normal situations." One of her own stomach- clenching fears was that
the forensic teams sent to Despite would find out that she talked in her sleep. She
didn't know, but if she had, and if she had talked during those nightmares . . .
"Yes, but now they're paying
attention," Peli said.
"Well, we didn't do anything
wrong." That was Arphan, a mere ensign. "We weren't traitors, and we didn't lead
the mutiny either. So I don't see where they can do anything to us."
"Not to you, no," Peli said,
with an edge of contempt. "From this, if from nothing else, ensigns are safe.
Although you could die of fright facing the Court."
"Why should I face a Court?"
Arphan, like Esmay, had come to the Academy from a non- Service family. Unlike Esmay, he
had come from a rich non-Service family, with friends who held Seats in Council, and
expected family clout to get him out of things.
"Regulations," Peli said
crisply. "You were a commissioned officer serving aboard a vessel on which a mutiny
occurred: you will stand before a Court." Esmay didn't mind Peli's brutal directness
so much when it was aimed at someone else, but she knew he'd be at her soon enough.
"But don't worry," Peli went on. "You're unlikely to spend very long at
hard labor. Esmay and I, on the other hand--" he looked up at her and smiled, a tight
unhappy smile. "Esmay and I are the senior surviving officers. Questions will be
asked. If they decide to make an example, we are the ones to be made an example of. Jigs
are an eminently expendable class."
Arphan looked at both of them, and then,
without another word, squeezed past two of the others, and Esmay at the door.
"Avoiding contamination," Liam
said cheerfully. He was another Jig, junior to Peli but part of Peli's "expendable
class."
"Just as well," Peli said.
"I don't like whiners. D'you know, he wanted me to press the admiral for damage
payments to replace a ruined uniform?"
Esmay could not help thinking what the
necessary replacements were going to do to her small savings.
"And he's rich," Liam said. Liam
Livadhi, Service to the core and for many generations, on both sides of the family. He
could afford to sound cheerful; he probably had a dozen cousins who had just outgrown
whatever uniforms he needed.
"Speaking of the court," Esmay
made herself say. "What are the uniform protocols?"
"Uniforms!" Peli glared at her.
"You too?"
"For the court, Peli, not for
display!" It came out sharper than she intended, and he blinked in surprise.
"Oh. Right." She could
practically see the little wheels flickering behind his eyes, calculating, remembering.
"I don't really know; the only things I've seen were those cubes back in the Academy,
in Military Law classes. And that was usually just the last day, the verdict. I don't know
if they wore dress the whole time."
"The thing is," Esmay said,
"if we need new uniforms made, we have to have time for it." Officers' dress
uniforms, unlike regular duty uniforms, were handmade by licensed tailors. She did not
want to appear before a court in something nonregulation.
"Good point. There wasn't much left
of the stuff in that compartment, so we have to assume that all our dress uniforms were
damaged." He looked up at her. "You'll have to ask about it, Esmay; you're still
the senior."
"Not any more." Even as she said
it, she knew she was, for this purpose. Peli didn't quite sneer, but he didn't offer to
help out, either.
"On this, you are the one. Sorry,
Es', but you have to."
Asking about the uniforms brought her to
the notice of the paper-pushers again. As captain--even for those few days--she had the
responsibility to sign off on all the innumerable forms required.
"Not the death letters,"
Lieutenant Commander Hosri said. "The admiral felt that the families would prefer to
have those signed by a more senior officer who could better explain the
circumstances." Esmay had completely forgotten that duty: the captain must write to
the family of any crew members who died while assigned to the ship. She felt herself
blushing. "And there are other major reports which the admiral feels should be
deferred until Forensics has completed its examination. But you left a lot of routine
stuff undone, Suiza."
"Yes, sir," Esmay said, her
heart sinking again. When could she have done it? How could she have known? The excuses
raced through her mind and out again: no excuses were enough.
"Have your officers fill out these
forms--" he handed her a sheaf of them. "Turn them in, completed and
countersigned by you, within 48 hours, and I'll forward them to the admiral's staff for
approval. If approved, that will authorize officers to arrange for replacements of
uniforms--and yes, that will include Fleet authorization to forward measurements to
registered tailors, so they can get started. Now, we need to deal with the basic reports
that should have been filed, or ready to file, at the time when you were relieved
of command of Despite."
The junior officers were not delighted
with the forms; some of them procrastinated, and Esmay found herself having to nag them to
finish the paperwork by the deadline. "None too early," grunted Hosri's senior
clerk, when Esmay brought the reports in. He glanced at the clock. "What'd you do,
wait until the last minute?"
She said nothing; she didn't like this
clerk, and she had had to work with him for two straight shifts on the incomplete reports
Hosri thought she should do. Just let it be over with, she told herself, even though she
knew that the reports were the least of her problems. While she worked on those, the other
young officers faced daily sessions with investigators determined to find out exactly how
it was that a R.S.S. patrol ship had been captained by a traitor, and then embroiled in
mutiny. Her turn would come next.
Forensics had swarmed over the Despite,
stripping the records from the automatic surveillance equipment, searching every
compartment, questioning every survivor, examining all the bodies in the ship's morgue.
Esmay could only imagine that search, from the questions they asked each day. First with
no visual cues at all, when they asked her to explain, moment by moment, where she had
been and what she had seen, heard and done when Captain Hearne took the ship away from
Xavier. Later, with a 3-D display of the ship, they led her through it again. Exactly
where had she been? Facing which way? When she said she saw Captain Hearne the last time,
where was Hearne, and what had she been doing?Esmay had never been good at this sort of
thing. She found out quickly that she had apparently perjured herself already: she could
not, from where she remembered she'd been sitting, have seen Lt. Commander Forrester come
out of the cross-corridor the way she'd said. It was, the interrogator pointed out,
physically impossible to see around corners without special instruments. Had she had any?
No. But her specialty had been scan. Was she sure she had not rigged something up? And
again here--lines of her earlier testimony moved down the monitor alongside the image of
the ship. Could she explain how she had gotten from her own quarters back here all
the way forward and down two decks in only fifteen seconds? Because there was a clear
picture of her--she recognized herself with familiar distaste--in the access corridor to
the forward portside battery at 18:30:15, when she had insisted she was in her own
quarters for the 18:30 duty report.
Esmay had no idea, and said so. She had
made a habit of being in her quarters for that duty report; it had meant that she didn't
have to linger in the junior officers' wardroom and join the day's gossip, or make her
report with the others. Surely she would have done so even more readily with the rumors
then sweeping the ship. She didn't like rumors; rumors got you in trouble. People fought
over rumors and then were in more trouble. She hadn't known that Captain Hearne was a
traitor--of course she hadn't--but she had had an uneasy feeling in the pit of her
stomach, and she had tried not to think about it.Not until she'd been dragged through it
again did she remember that someone had paged her and told her to come initial the daily
scan log of the warhead lockers. Checking the automatic scans had been part of her daily
routine. She'd insisted that she had done it, and whoever it was had insisted she hadn't,
and finally she'd gone down to see. Who had called her? She didn't remember. And what had
she found when she got there?
"I'd made an error entering the scan
code," Esmay said. "At least--I guess that's what it was."
"What do you mean?" This
interrogator had the most neutral voice Esmay had ever heard; it made her nervous for
reasons she could not define.
"Well . . . the number was wrong.
Sometimes that happened. But usually it wouldn't enter; it would signal a conflict."
"Explain, please."
Esmay struggled on, caught between the
social desire not to bore the listener, and the innocent's need to explain fully why she
wasn't guilty. She had entered, during her rotation, thousands of scan log codes.
Sometimes she made mistakes; everyone did. She did not say, what she had long thought,
which was how silly it was to have officers entering codes by hand, when there were
perfectly decent, inexpensive code readers which could enter them directly. When she made
a mistake, the coder usually locked up, refusing entry. But occasionally, it would accept
the error code, only to hang up when the next shift compared its code to hers.
"Then they'd call me, and I'd have to
come myself and reset the code, and initial the change. That must be what happened."
"I see." A pause during which
she could feel the sweat springing out on her neck. "And from what station did you
make the 18:30 report, then?"
She had no idea. Going from her
quarters--she could see the route clearly in her mind, but she could not remember calling
in. Yet if she hadn't, someone would have logged it . . . except that was when, up on the
bridge, the mutineers made their move against Captain Hearne. Sometime around then,
anyway.
"I don't know that I did," she
said. "I don't remember that I didn't. I got to the weapons bay, reset the codes,
initialed them, and came back to my quarters, and then--" By then the mutiny had
spread beyond the bridge, and the senior mutineers had sent someone down to keep the
juniors out of it if they could. That hadn't worked; there had been more traitors than
that.
The investigator nodded shortly, and went
on to something else. To a series of somethings else. Finally, over many sessions, they
worked their way up to the time when she herself was in charge.
Could she explain her decision to return
to Xavier system and try to fight a battle against odds, with no senior officers and
substantial casualties? Only briefly, and obliquely, had she allowed herself to think of
her decision as heroic. Reality wouldn't let her dwell on it. She hadn't known what she
was doing; her inexperience had caused too many deaths. Even though it came out all right
in the end, in one way, it was not all right for those who had died.
If it wasn't heroic, what was it? It
looked stupid now, foolhardy. Yet . . . her crew, despite her inexperience, had blown away
the enemy flagship.
"I . . . remembered Commander
Serrano," she said. "I had to come back. After sending a message, so in
case--"
"Gallant, but hardly practical,"
said this interrogator, whose voice had a twang she associated with central Familias
planets. "You are a protegee of Commander Serrano?"
"No." She dared not claim that;
they had served on the same ship only once, and had not been friends. She explained, to
someone who surely knew better than she, how wide the gap between a raw ensign of
provincial background, and a major rising on the twin plumes of ability and family.
"Not a . . . er . . . particular
friend?" This with a meaningful smirk.
Esmay barely kept herself from snorting.
What did he think she was, some prude off a back-country planet that didn't know one sex
from the other? That could not call things by their right names? She put out of mind her
aunt, who certainly would never use the terms common in the Fleet."No. We were not
lovers. We were not friends. She was a major, command track; I was an ensign, technical
track. It's just that she was polite--"
"Others weren't?" In the same
tone.
"Not always," Esmay said, before
she could stop herself. Too late now; she might as well complete the portrait of a
provincial idiot. "I'm not from a Fleet family. I'm from Altiplano--the first person
from Altiplano to attend the Academy. Some people thought it was a hoot." Too late
again, she remembered that expression's Fleet meaning. "A regrettably laughable
imposition," she added, to the raised eyebrows. "In our slang." Which was
no stranger than Fleet slang, just someone else's. Which was the point: Heris Serrano had
never laughed at it. But she wouldn't say that to those eyebrows, which right now made her
wonder which great Fleet family she had just insulted.
"Altiplano. Yes." The eyebrows
had come down, but the tone of condescension hadn't. "That is a planet where the
Ageist influence is particularly strong, isn't it?"
"Ageists?" Esmay scrambled
through what she knew of politics at home--she had not been home since she was
sixteen--and came up with nothing. "I don't think anyone in Altiplano hates old
people."
"No, no," the man said. "Ageists--surely
you know. They oppose rejuvenation."
Esmay stared at him, now thoroughly
confused. "Oppose rejuvenation? Why?" Not her relatives, who would be only too
happy if Papa Stefan lived forever; he was the only one who could keep Sanni and Berthol
from each other's throats, and those two were essential.
"How closely do you follow events on
Altiplano?" the man asked.
"I don't," Esmay said. She had
left it behind gladly; she had discarded without watching the newscube subscription her
family sent her. She had finally decided, in the bleak aftermath of a nightmare in which
she was not only stripped of her commission but sentenced to a term of hard labor, that
she would never go back to Altiplano, no matter what. They could throw her out of Fleet,
but they couldn't make her go home. She had looked it up: no judicial action could force
someone to return to their planet of origin for crimes committed somewhere else. "And
I can't believe they really oppose rejuvenation . . . at least, I can't imagine anyone I
know thinking that way."
"Oh?"
Since he seemed interested, the first
person in years who had shown any interest at all, Esmay found herself telling him about
Papa Stefan, Sanni, Berthol, and the rest, at least insofar as it bore on their likely
attitude towards rejuv. When she slowed down, he interrupted.
"And is your family . . . er . . .
prominent on Altiplano?"
Surely that was in her file. "My
father's a regional commander in the militia," she said. "The ranks aren't
equivalent, but there are only four regional commanders on Altiplano." It would be
the height of bad manners to say more; if he couldn't figure out from that where she stood
socially on her home planet, then he'd have to suffer in ignorance.
"And you chose to go into Fleet?
Why?"
That again. She had dealt with that in her
first application, and during the entrance interviews and the military psychology classes
as well. She rattled off the explanation that had always seemed to go best, and it sank
into the investigator's unresponsive gaze.
"Is that all?"
"Well . . . yes." The smart
young officer did not talk about wish fulfillment, the hours she'd spent in the manor
orchard staring up at the stars and promising herself she'd be there someday. Better to be
matter-of-fact, practical, sensible. No one wanted wild-eyed dreamers, fanatics.
Especially not from worlds that had only a couple of centuries of human colonization.
But his silence dragged another sentence
out of her. "I loved the thought of going into space," she said. And felt
herself flushing, the telltale heat on her face and neck. She hated her fair skin that
always showed her emotions.
"Ah," he said, touching his
stylus to his datapad. "Well, Lieutenant, that will be all." For now, his
look said. It could not be the end of questioning; that wasn't how things worked. Esmay
said nothing except the polite formula he expected, and went back to her temporary
quarters.
She had not realized until the second or
third shift aboard the flagship that only she, of the young mutineers, had a private
compartment. She wasn't sure why, since there were three other women, all crammed into one
compartment. She'd have been happy to share-- well, not happy, but willing--but the
admiral's orders left no room for argument, as Esmay found when she asked the officer
assigned as their keeper if she could change the arrange- ment. He'd looked disgusted, and
told her no so firmly that her eardrums rattled.
So she had privacy, if she wanted it. She
could lie on her bunk (someone else's bunk, but hers for the duration), and remember. And
try to think. She didn't really like either, not alone. She had the kind of mind that
worked best alongside others, striking sparks from her own and others' intransigence.
Alone, it whirred uselessly, recycling the same thoughts over and over.
But the others did not want to talk about
what bothered her. No, that was not quite honest. She did not want to talk to them about
those things either. She did not want to talk about how she felt when she saw the first
casualties of the mutiny--how the smell of blood and scorched decking affected her, how it
brought back memories she had hoped were gone forever.
War isn't clean anywhere, Esmay.
Her father had said that, when she'd told him she wanted to go into space, wanted to
become a Fleet officer. Human blood and human guts smell the same; human cries sound
the same.
She had said she knew it; she had thought
she knew it. But those hours in the orchard, looking up at the distant stars, clean light
on clean darkness . . . she had hoped for something better. Not security, no: she was too
much her father's child to wish for that. But something clean-edged, the danger sharpened
by vacuum and weapons that vaporized . . .
She had been wrong, and now she knew it in
every reluctant cell of her body.
"Esmay?" Someone tapped on her
door. Esmay glanced at the timer and sat up hurriedly. She must have dozed off.
"I'm coming," she said. A quick
glance in the mirror; she had the flyaway sort of hair that always needed something done
to it. If it had been acceptable, she'd have cut it a centimeter long and let it be. She
swiped at it, both hands, and palmed the door control. Peli outside, looking worried.
"Are you all right? You weren't at
lunch, and now--"
"Another interview," Esmay said
quickly. "And I wasn't really hungry anyway. I'm coming." She wasn't hungry now,
either, but skipping meals brought the psychnannies down on you, and she had no desire to
be interviewed by yet another set of inquiring minds.
Supper sat uneasily in her stomach; she
sat in the crowded little wardroom not really listening to the others talk. It was mostly
guesses about where they were, and when they would arrive, and how long it would take to
convene the court. Who would sit on it, who would represent them, how much trouble this
would cause them in the future.
"Not as much as being under Captain
Hearne if she'd gotten away with it," Esmay heard herself say. She hadn't meant to
say anything, but she knew she was the only one really at risk in court. And here they
were chattering away as if all that mattered was a possible black mark that might keep
them from promotion ahead of their group.
They stared at her. "What do you
mean?" Liam Livadhi asked. "Hearne couldn't have gotten away with it. Not unless
she took the ship straight over to Benignity--" He stopped, looking suddenly pale.
"Exactly," Esmay said. "She
could have done that, if Dovir and the other loyalist hadn't stopped her. And we could all
be Benignity prisoners." Dead, or worse than. The others looked at her as if she had
suddenly sprouted a full suit of battle armor with weaponry. "Or she could have told
Fleet that Heris Serrano was the traitor, that the accusations were false, and she had
fled to save her ship and crew from a maniac. She could have assumed that no one could
defeat a Benignity assault group with only two warships." And even Heris Serrano had
not done so; Esmay had recognized the peril even as she ended it. Without her own decisive
entry into battle, Serrano would have perished, and all witnesses to Hearne's treachery
with her.
Peli and Liam looked at Esmay with more
respect than she'd had from them yet, even in battle. "I never thought of all
that," Peli said. "It never occurred to me that Hearne could have gotten away
with it . . . but you're right. We might not even have known--only those on the bridge
actually heard Captain Serrano's challenge. If one more bridge officer had been a
Benignity agent--"
"We'd be dead." Liam rumpled his
Livadhi-red hair. "Ouch. I don't like the thought that I might have disappeared that
way."
Arphan scowled. "Surely they'd have
ransomed us. I know my family--"
"Traders!" Liam said, in a tone
that made it sound like a cognate of traitors. "I suppose your Family does business
with them, eh?"
Arphan jumped up, eyes blazing. "I
don't have to be insulted by people like you-- "
"As a matter of fact, you do,"
Liam said, leaning back. "I outrank you, trade-born infant. You're still just an
ensign, in case you hadn't noticed."
"No quarreling," Esmay said.
This she could handle. "Livadhi, he can't help who his family is. Arphan, Livadhi is
your senior; show respect."
"Whooo," murmured Peli.
"The ex-captain remembers the feel of command." But his tone was more admiring
than scornful. Esmay was able to grin at him.
"As a matter of fact, I do. And
keeping you juniors from messing each other's uniforms is easier than fighting a battle.
Shall we keep it that way?"
Expressions ranging from surprise to
satisfaction met her gaze; she kept the smile on her face and eventually they all smiled
back.
"Sure, Esmay," Livadhi said.
"I'm sorry, Arphan--I shouldn't have chosen this time, if any, to slang your family.
Lieutenant Suiza's right. Friends?" He held out his hand. Arphan, still scowling,
finally shook it, muttering something about being sorry. It did not escape Esmay's notice
that he had chosen a combination of address which claimed her as a friend, while
emphasizing her authority to Arphan. She could do that sort of thing if she thought of it,
but she had to think; Liam Livadhi, and the others born into Fleet families, seemed to do
it as naturally as breathing.