Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TFNS Ishtar

Wormhole Space

January 9, 2553


“Why aren’t we using the transit shaft…Sir?” Eira asked.

Callum caught a handhold, halting himself, and rolled in the microgravity to look back at her. She gave him one of her best “what silliness are you up to now?” looks, and he grinned.

“I needed the exercise?” he suggested.

“No, you didn’t,” she replied. “And if you did, there’s always the officers’ gym two decks down from your quarters.”

“Eira, don’t you ever do things just because it might be fun to try something different?”

“I do lots of things for fun, Sir. When,” she added pointedly, “I’m not on duty.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that, I guess.” Callum’s grin turned into a grimace. “Since I never see much of you when you’re not on duty. Not like when your room was right across the hall like it was on Crann Bethadh, anyway.”

“That was different,” she said. “Different from shipboard duty, I mean. You’re an officer; I’m enlisted. You’re in officers’ country, and I’m down on Berthing Deck Seven.” She shrugged. “Probably just as well. I never liked what some people thought on Crann Bethadh.”

“Thought about what?” Callum asked, and a hint of color might have touched her cheekbones as she looked away.

“About us. About why my room was next to yours. They thought we were…well, they thought exactly what the Sergeant Major wanted them to think.”

“What he—?”

Callum paused and his good eye narrowed.

“Why in the world would he have wanted people to think that?” he asked.

“Because…because if they thought that we were…you know…then they wouldn’t realize I was really your bodyguard, so they might underestimate me. Not realize you had someone watching your back. Sir.”

“Why that sneaky old bastard,” Callum said softly, then snorted. “I should have figured that out for myself, shouldn’t I? Not that I’d ever have tried to do anything of the sort, of course.” She shot him a quick glance, and he grimaced again. “I mean, best estimate, you’re four years younger than me, just for a start. And I know you were a slave. I even know what kind of slave you were supposed to be. And you don’t have any family, no one to look out for you. And I was the Governor’s son—just like I’m the Admiral’s son, now. Of course I wouldn’t have put that kind of pressure on you! What kind of man would?”

“Oh, a lot of them,” she said, with an edge of bitterness. “They see this—” she tapped the genetic slave brand above her left eye “—and they think ‘why not?’”

“What?” Callum frowned. “Who? When? I’ll—”

“Don’t worry about it, Sir.” She shook her head. “I had to put up with a lot of the same kind of stuff on Inverness. And at least nobody pushes it now, the way some of ’em did there.” She flashed him a smile. “Smaj told me that as long as Faeran can put them back together again, it’s all fine with him.”

Callum gazed at her for a long moment, then chuckled.

“And how many has she had to put back together again?” he asked.

“Only a few.” Her smile grew broader. “I think word got around.”

“Well, good for you!”

“But you still haven’t answered my question, Sir,” she pointed out. “Why are we going the long way instead of using the transit shaft?”

“Mostly because I wanted to take the scenic route,” he said. “Most people just automatically hop into the intra-ship car and never think about the scenery they’re passing up.”

“Scenery,” she repeated in a dubious tone and looked around.

At the moment, they were at just about the midpoint of the manual access way that served PR-2, Ishtar’s Number Two parasite rack, and the well-lit passage narrowed to pinprick size both ahead and behind. Not surprisingly, since it was sixteen hundred meters long and only five meters in diameter. The rounded outer edge of the transit shaft cut a half-moon-shaped slice out of that five meters, which meant the actual passage width was no more than three and a half meters, and as Eira had just suggested, very few people used it. The transit shaft was much faster and easier, even in microgravity.

“Yeah, scenery,” he said, checking the frame number stenciled on a bulkhead. “We’re almost there. Come on.”

She regarded him skeptically, but pushed off behind him as he started along the passage once more. They traveled another fifty meters or so before he caught another handhold and stopped. Eira settled beside him, after her usual spinal-reflex look both ways along the deserted, brightly lit bore. He looked down at her with a grin, and she gave him the sort of exasperated look governesses and tutors had bestowed upon their wayward charges since at least Hammurabi’s day.

“You don’t see it?” he asked.

“See what?”

“Oops. Wait a sec!”

His grin grew broader, and then he tapped the control pad she hadn’t noticed and the surface of the passageway’s outboard bulkhead slid aside to reveal a six-meter-long, overhead-to-decksole viewport.

Eira’s eyes went wide as she found herself staring out into wormhole space through the water-clear crystoplast.

Very few people cared to look at the emptiness around an FTLC when it went supralight. It was such a complete emptiness. It wasn’t black, wasn’t light or dark, offered no pinprick stars, no moons. Just nothingness. An absence of visual stimuli to which the human eye and brain were ill adapted.

But that wasn’t what Eira saw now. Not this time.

The flank of TFNS Gallant, the sublight battleship riding the lead position on PR-2, loomed out above their viewpoint as far as she could see in either direction. She’d never seen a parasite warship from such a short range, and she saw two of Gallant’s running lights, burning the steady green of a docked vessel, before her. The edge of a laser point defense station’s emitter heads were just visible, protruding beyond the battleship’s curved flank, and knife-sharp sensor arrays projected even farther, looming against the featureless blur. And beyond that—so far away even its stupendous bulk appeared no larger than a child’s toy—was Ishtar’s sister ship, Ereshkigal. The black hole of Ereshkigal’s Fasset drive was far too tiny for anyone to have seen, even if the artificial black hole hadn’t drunk in any light that hit it, but the huge ship’s drive fan was almost four hundred and thirty meters in diameter, and its thirteen-hundred-meter circumference was a corona of lambent flame. It was vanishingly rare for ships in wormhole space to be close enough to pick out with the naked eye, but TF 1705 was a fleet in everything but name. And as Eira stared at Ereshkigal, she saw the glitter of yet another, more distant drive fan that must belong to Gilgamesh, the third unit of FTLC Squadron 19.

That was more than startling enough, but a flickering nimbus seemed to crawl along Gallant’s armored flank, as well. It was an eerie blue glow that was oddly, serenely gorgeous and seemed almost…liquid. She knew it wasn’t—that it couldn’t be—but that was what it looked like. In fact, she almost thought she could see…droplets of it splashing astern from the sensor array’s aerials.

“I never knew the carriers looked like that,” she said, after a moment. “And what’s that…glow on the battleship?”

That’s what I brought you to see,” Colin replied. “Or, rather, to think you’re seeing.”

“What?” She looked away from the viewport, peering at him with the expression of someone who knew she’d just missed the punch line to a joke.

“No one really knows what you’re seeing.” Callum’s tone was more serious than it had been. “As far as we’ve ever been able to document, it’s an optical illusion. But the funny thing is that only the human eye actually sees it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that there are megabytes—hell, exabytes—of recorded imagery of exactly what you’re looking at right this minute…that doesn’t show any of that blue glow. None. And nobody’s ever been able to measure any energy flow, any emissions, any radiation, or anything else that could produce it. Every instrument we have insists it’s not there, but anyone who actually looks at it with his or her own eyes sees it. And the really funny thing is that nobody’s ever sure they’re seeing exactly what someone else sees. Because we can’t record it. We can’t copy it for reference so we can both say, yup, that’s what it looks like to me, too.” He grinned at her. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“That doesn’t seem possible,” she said.

“Lots of stuff we still haven’t explained, Eira,” he said, turning back to the viewport, his single eye darkly thoughtful. “Not too surprising, I guess. I mean, the universe’s a big place, and whatever most people think, we’ve only seen tiny little piece of it so far, really. But the working spacers call that ‘Barend’s Candle,’ after some historical sailor named Barend Fokke, from way back in the seventeenth century on Earth.”

“Why?” Eira asked, looking back with a fascinated expression at the nonexistent glow her eyes insisted she saw.

“I don’t know all the details, but my grandfather told me a lot of people think he was the model for something called the Flying Dutchman—a ghost ship that can never make port.” Callum’s expression was almost dreamy. “Makes sense, I guess. You can only see it—if you really do see it, of course—in wormhole space, and you can’t measure it, can’t record it, can’t even detect it even here. But there it is. If that’s not ‘ghostly,’ I don’t know what is.”

“It’s…beautiful, Sir,” she said.

“Don’t call me that,” he said, turning his head to look at her.

“Call you what?”

She looked back at him, her expression confused.

“Sir.” He shook his head. “Don’t call me that when we’re alone. I don’t like it.”

“You’re an officer. I’m a lance corporal. That’s what I’m supposed to call you, Sir,” she said.

“In public, maybe.”

“Everywhere!”

“Eira, you’ve been there when Captain O’Hanrahan calls my dad Terry, and everybody knows an admiral comes maybe a half step behind God. If he can do that in front of the entire flag bridge, then you can call me Callum when it’s just the two of us.”

“But—”

He held up an index finger, and she stopped in midsentence.

“Callum,” he said.

“But—”

He waggled the finger.

“Cal-lum. Two syllables. It’s not hard.”

She frowned at him, and he tapped the tip of her nose gently with his finger.

“Callum,” she said finally.

“There! Was that so hard?”

“Yes, actually,” she said.

It was his turn to frown at her, and she shook her head.

“Structure…structure is important,” she said. “It’s the place I stand. Sam and I never had anything in our lives that was real, that might last. Not when the slavers had us, not on Inverness—nowhere, until you and the Admiral rescued me. I don’t think you can understand what that meant. You were born in the Five Hundred. You always knew who you were, who the people around you were, that your world—or your brother’s world—wasn’t going to just…end tomorrow. There was order in your life.”

He gazed into her blue eyes, saw the darkness behind them, and felt a stir of something like guilt. It wasn’t guilt—not exactly. But it was the awareness, the realization, of just how completely Eira’s universe had tried to chew her up and spit her out.

“When you got your father to let me enlist instead of sending me back with Drebin to face trial for attacking him, you did more than just save my life…Callum. You gave me a life. You gave me Smaj, and the team, and a place to stand. A place I know is mine. Sure, I’m only a lance corporal, the most junior noncom there is. But that’s mine, too. I know who I am today, and I know who I’ll be tomorrow, and that’s why structure and procedure and doing it right the first time is so important. I’m not…I’m not fighting some kind of holding action against the entire universe anymore. I’m me, and for the first time in my entire life, I’m proud of who I am.

“That’s what you gave me when you talked your father into letting me enlist.” Those blue eyes gleamed now, with what could have been unshed tears, and she shook her head again, slowly. “You and the Admiral saved my life on Inverness; you gave me my life here in Ishtar.”

“I never thought of it that way,” he said slowly.

“I know.” It was unlike her to initiate physical contact with him, but she reached out, patted him on the forearm. “It’s not your fault,” she said almost gently. “We just…come from really different places.”

“But I should’ve thought about it.” He frowned, touched her cheek gently. “I mean, I knew things were bad on Inverness and…before. And I guess that’s one reason I want to give you things, to make up for it.”

“Like that Silver Tree sculpture you bought me that first day in Tara?” She smiled at him. “I’d never even dreamed of having something that nice, that beautiful! It was wonderful.”

“But it was so small compared to everything else.”

“Not to me,” she said simply. “But that’s why getting things done the right way first is so important to me.”

“All right, I can see that. But I’m not the most military of officers, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m planning on going back to civvies as soon as this gigantic mess is over with, and I guess that colors my thinking. Because I don’t—maybe I should, but I don’t—think of you as a subordinate. I know you’re my official bodyguard. But I’m not supposed to need bodyguards. And there’s a part of me—a pretty big part—that thinks I should be the one protecting you. And, no,” he smiled almost naturally, “not because you’re such an itty-bitty thing you need taking care of. It’s just—”

He paused for a moment, then shrugged.

“Remember when you were in that field hospital on Inverness and I was feeding you ice chips?” She nodded, and he shrugged again. “That reminded me of this time my sister Reagan and I were playing in the family garage and I dared her to trip the maglev safeties on Mom’s antique Tesla Model 37. She got knocked off her feet—not hurt, but scared to death—and I felt so bad…”

“So I’m like your sister?”

“No. No! You’re a lot prettier than she is. I meant—Wait.” Callum pressed the back of his hand against his eyepatch and grimaced. “Damned thing’s itching again.”

“Let me see.”

She raised a hand to his face, but he caught her wrist gently.

“It’s not pretty under there.” He pushed her arm down slowly. “I’d rather you keep the same high opinion you had of my face when we first met.”

“Si—Callum, I had to drag you into the life pod while the Kolyma finished coming apart around us, and then I had to patch your helmet visor and put a tourniquet on your leg. Had to cut your vac suit off to get at it, for that matter, and you were bleeding bad. Your blood was all over the place—including all over me—and I even saw the marrow of your leg bone leaking out. So—”

She slapped a hand over her mouth.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, turning away.

“Why? It happened. That bone’s gone, anyway.” He rapped on his prosthesis. “It’ll get replaced eventually.”

“Maybe.” She lowered her hand. “But my point is the way your eye looks now can’t possibly be any worse than it looked then.”

“Point,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t remember you seeing me that way. So it’s like it never really happened, right?”

“That has to be the silliest thing I’ve ever heard, even out of you.”

“No, it’s perfectly logical.” He raised his nose with an audible sniff. “It’s not my fault if you are incapable of following my own scintillating powers of reasoning.”

“I’m a backwoods Fringe girl from Scotia, so I’m not sure what ‘scintillating’ is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the way your ‘powers of reasoning’ work,” she said severely. “Now move your hand and let me look!”

He looked at her for another moment, then moved his hand.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, and leaned down closer to her as she gently lifted the patch and examined the empty, badly scarred socket.

“I see a little irritation,” she said, peering at it carefully, and he bent still closer. “It doesn’t look too bad, though. We might want to stop by sick bay and see about getting some—”

Her voice stopped in mid-word as his lips suddenly touched hers.

Her eyes flared wide and her entire body stiffened in astonishment. For an instant, the universe seemed to stop, and then her hands cupped his head and her lips were hot and welcoming under his, pressing back into the kiss until—

“Oh, God!” Callum pulled back. “Oh, my God, Eira! I never meant to do that! I didn’t! You don’t need me doing…doing things like that! I’m so—”

“Sir—Callum!” She grabbed the front of his shipsuit and shook him. “Shut up!”

“I promise I’ll never do—Wait.” He stopped, looked at her sharply. “Did you just tell me to shut up?”

“Uh, yes. I guess so.” She gazed back up at him, and her fair complexion showed a rosy edge of blush. “It’s not the first time anybody ever kissed me, you know,” she added.

“It’s not?”

“No, of course not! It’s just…the first time I liked it.” The blush grew stronger. “A lot, actually.”

“Oh, lordy.” Callum shook his head. “Dad is so gonna kill me dead for this! He’s got these ironclad principles, and I think I just sort of stepped all over them.”

Eira smiled.

“I think he’ll probably forgive—”

She broke off, looking up the passage beyond Callum, and slapped a hand against her holster.

He turned to look in the same direction and saw another crewman swimming rapidly down the microgravity passage toward them.

“I can explain,” he began. “We were just—”

The newcomer’s head snapped up at the sound of Callum’s voice. Something about his expression poked at Callum, but before he could put a finger on what it was, the other man had grabbed a handhold, stopped himself in midair, and reached into the front of his shipsuit.

His hand came out with a pistol.

Eira’s left hand struck like a viper. It locked on Callum’s shoulder even as her right hand drew her weapon. She yanked him down and to the side, flinging him out of the line of fire, while her right foot wedged itself into the viewport’s recess to stabilize hers as her own pistiol rose.

Callum felt his face hit the decksole even as gunfire shredded the quiet. His own right hand reached for a holster that wasn’t there as the rapid shots deafened one of his ears, and then he twisted around, eyes searching frantically for Eira.

The newcomer floated in the microgravity. The back of his skull had disappeared, and dark red chunks laced with gray and white drifted in a cloud. His limbs jerked and twitched as his nervous system faded away.

Callum couldn’t have cared less. His entire world was focused on Eira, and his belly knotted. She was curled into a ball, her left arm—its sleeve already crimson—crushed against her side, and blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were unfocused, but her gunhand was still up, the muzzle still tracking toward the man who’d shot her.

“Cal—” she got out.

“Eira!”

He hurled himself through the air toward her, slapped a hand against the wound in her side, felt bits of shattered rib.

“Don’t—don’t move. I’ll get you out of here!” Callum tried to maintain the same steady bearing his father and O’Hanraghty always seemed to have.

Eira coughed out a globule of blood and her eyes rolled up.

“Oh, Jesus,” Callum Murphy whispered. Then he wrapped both arms around her, gathered his legs against the bulkhead, and straightened them explosively to send them streaking down-passage to the nearest transit shaft access point.

* * *

Terrence Murphy looked down at a display screen in his flag briefing room.

Callum sat next to Eira’s sick bay bed. Three different IVs ran into her arms, the synthaflesh dressing on her side was pinker than it ought to have been, and her eyes were closed as she lay very, very still.

Callum’s shoulders were hunched, and he rocked slightly.

“Dr. Barbeau says she’ll recover pretty quickly, all things considered,” O’Hanraghty said from behind him. Murphy looked up, over his shoulder, and the chief of staff shrugged. His tunic hung half open and a lick of his red hair was out of place, exposing a growing bald spot. “It’s a good thing he got her to a corpsman as quickly as he did, though. Took one round right through her left lung. Doc says it did a lot of damage.”

“What the hell were they doing there?” Murphy demanded, and O’Hanraghty chuckled.

“Callum was supposed to join me, Mirawani, Commodore Hinson, and the parasite group skippers aboard Trebuchet for that in-person brief on our deployment options if the alpha plan goes belly-up when we hit Bellerophon. I figured it’d be good experience for him, and God knows he needs as much of that as we can give him. Boy’s smarter than hell, Terry, and he’s working his ass off, however hard he tries to pretend he’s not. But there are still too many blind spots the Academy would have taken care of.”

He arched an eyebrow at Murpphy, and the admiral nodded.

“Anyway,” O’Hanraghty resumed, “he decided to leave early and swim the passage so he could show her Barend’s Candle. Apparently she’d never even heard of it.” He shook his head with a tiny smile. “Sometimes I forget how damned young she is and how little she’s actually seen. I’ll bet it really knocked her socks off. But—” his small smile disappeared, and his eyes hardened as he, too, gazed at the wounded Marine in the bed “—it didn’t lessen her situational awareness one bit, Terry. She’s the only reason Callum’s still alive.”

“Again.” Murphy ran both sets of fingers through his hair and exhaled explosively. “Again,” he repeated more softly.

“I’d say stopping off at Inverness has paid off several times now,” O’Hanraghty agreed, and Murphy nodded.

“It has that, Harry. Indeed, it has. But—” he waved O’Hanraghty into one of the briefing room chairs “—who the hell was that guy and what the hell happened?”

“First part’s easy enough,” O’Hanraghty said, dropping into the indicated chair. “Petty Officer (Engineering) Second-Class Augusto Cortaberri, from Caledonia Secunda. Assigned to Gallant’s Electronics Department. Pretty good cyber tech, from his efficiency reports.”

“Caledonia Secunda…that’s Fringe,” Murphy murmured.

“Yep. But it’s Northern Lobe, not Southern. Don’t know how much difference—if any—that makes, but there it is.”

Murphy nodded and tipped back in his chair.

“Okay, that’s the who. At least tentatively. What about the what?”

“That’s where it gets interesting,” O’Hanraghty said. “Gallant’s one of the ships we picked up at Jalal. Came over with basically her entire crew, including her CO—Cecilia Porro, good skipper, from her record—but according to his crewmates, Cortaberri pretty much sat the mutiny out. He didn’t rush to join Captain Porro when she declared for the mutiny, but he didn’t try to oppose it, either. Maybe just because he wasn’t in any position to.

“Anyway, since the mutiny, his behavior’s been exemplary. In fact, the only thing Commander Trossingen—he’s Porro’s XO—could tell me about any changes in it is that he hasn’t been spending his free time with other members of Gallant’s company when they come aboard to use Ishtar’s visiting crew’s rec compartment and gymnasium. Apparently, he’s been taking the opportunity to get to know the parasite group’s other personnel, instead, since Gallant’s new to the task force. Captain Lowe’s looking into the security cam imagery from the times he’s been aboard, but so far nothing especially suspicious about that.

“On the other hand,” O’Hanraghty’s expression turned grimmer, “if we don’t find anything, it’s only going to be because we aren’t looking in the right place. Or else because our deceased friend was a lot more careful than most of the professional spooks I know, because he was definitely dirty, Terry.”

“How dirty? And how do you know, if Joe hasn’t found anything in the security imagery?”

“I could begin by pointing out that he tried to shoot Callum and Eira,” O’Hanraghty said dryly. “I don’t think he had a clue who Callum was when he went for his gun—I could be wrong about that, but it happened awful quickly—so I doubt he was some kind of assassin. I think he was headed to meet someone aboard Ishtar as secretly as possible and took the scenic route to avoid being seen in one of the intra-ship cars or turning up on its security cam video. He never expected to see anyone rubbernecking in wormhole space, and I think he just panicked when he realized he’d been spotted and that Callum and Eira might remember seeing him and be able to describe him. If he’d just kept his head down and kept going, he’d probably still be alive, Eira wouldn’t be in sick bay, and we might’ve found ourselves pretty much screwed when we get to Bellerophon.”

“Why?” Murphy’s eyes narrowed.

“Because he had a flash chip in his pocket. Very interesting flash chip, with a clutch of really cute Trojans. Bryant’s looking at them right now—and keeping them the hell away from the main servers while he does it—and there’s at least one program he hasn’t been able to crack yet. Got a pretty good idea about three of the others, though.”

“And those three are…?” Murphy asked.

“One of them would have used Ishtar’s tac net to shut down all of our parasite group’s point-defense stations at the moment her own were ordered to engage. Another one would have locked the parasite racks when we tried to deploy. That one we could’ve gotten around pretty quickly, which is probably why number two was waiting to shut down their point defense just as the missiles came in. My favorite was number three, though. That’s the one that would have used Ishtar’s main dish to burst-transmit our ID, our order of battle, and a summary report of the Battle of Jalal to Odysseus the moment we dropped sublight in the Bellerophon System.”

“And MacTavish says there’s a fourth one?”

“Yep. May never figure out what that one was supposed to be, though. He doesn’t think he’s gonna break it by the time we hit Bellerophon, anyway.”

Murphy nodded. By the universe at large’s calendar, Ishtar and her consorts were still thirteen days out of Bellerophon. By her own, she was only about forty-three hours from arrival. That didn’t give his intelligence officer a lot of time to work the problem.

“On the other hand,” O’Hanraghty continued, “the fact that Bryant can’t even get into it is another indication Cortaberri wasn’t working alone. According to Bryant, the holdout’s fingerprints indicate that it was created by somebody a lot sneakier than Cortaberri. For that matter, Cortaberri couldn’t have uploaded his chip to Ishtar’s servers. He didn’t have access. So what it looks like was happening here was that he was on his way to hand deliver the chip to someone aboard Ishtar—or someone assigned to one of our other parasites—who does have access.” He shook his head. “Either way, we’ve got rats in the woodwork, Terry.”

“That was always a given.” Murphy sighed. “We had proof enough of that with Vitek and Zamorano in Jalal. And hard to blame them, in some ways. But I want all of Cortaberri’s movements and contacts under a microscope, Harry. We need to find out who he was talking to.”

“Joe and I are both on it, and Bryant’s taking another real hard look at our cybersecurity. At least we know what the threat is now. Thanks to Callum and Eira.”

“Yeah.” Murphy turned back to the display, watching as Callum reached out and touched Eira’s limp hand very gently. “Thanks to them.” He shook his head. “I almost got both of them killed in New Dublin when Kolyma got hit. Now this.” He shook his head again. “It’s costing too much, Harry. They can’t keep dodging forever.”

“The one thing we’re all promised is that nobody gets out of life alive.” O’Hanraghty’s eyes were sad as he, too, looked at the sick bay feed. “So far, they’ve both done pretty good. It’s up to you and me to keep it that way, I guess.”

“I know,” Murphy said quietly. “Believe me, I know.”

* * *

Eira’s eyes fluttered open.

For a long moment, she had no idea where she was. But then those eyes moved to the blurry figure beside her bed and sharpened.

“Callum?” She blinked. “Callum, are you okay?”

“You’re awake!” Callum reached out, grabbed her hand. “How’s your pain level? Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“Are you okay?” she repeated more sharply.

“I didn’t get shot. You did. You saved my life.” He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Again.”

“How bad is it?” she asked, sweeping her free hand in a gesture that encompassed the sick bay cubicle.

“Could be better.” His smile faded. “You took three hits. The bad one was your left lung, but Doc Barbeau says you’re gonna be fine. It’ll be a while before Logan gets to start running you ragged again, though.”

Eira winced at the mention of the sergeant major.

“He’s going to be so angry at me for letting you get shot at,” she said.

“It wasn’t your fault!”

“Doesn’t matter whose ‘fault’ it is. What matters is that it happened.”

“What matters is that you kept me alive, which should be enough to keep even Logan satisfied. And if it isn’t, he’ll hear about it from me!”

She looked at him dubiously, then shook her head on the pillow.

“The killer?” she asked, pulling her hand out of his grip and trying to push herself more upright.

“You nailed him.” Callum tapped the bed controls, raising the end of the bed behind her shoulders. “I don’t have all the juicy details—I’ve been hanging around here waiting for somebody to wake up—but O’Hanraghty and MacTavish say he was a saboteur. Had a bunch of Trojans for the central computer net. I dunno exactly what they would’ve done, but I’m pretty sure it would’ve been bad. Except you were in the right place to stop him. You’re a hero!”

He patted her shin through the sheets.

“Is it supposed to hurt this much?” she asked.

“If you need more painkillers, don’t be stupid enough to not ask for them. Trust me, I speak from a certain level of personal experience on that one.”

“Am I in trouble?” she asked, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. “For almost letting you be killed,” she clarified.

“Trouble with who?” Callum shrugged. “Logan’s been a frigging whirlwind looking for more spies, and O’Hanraghty and MacTavish have been taking the bad guy’s Trojans apart. Far as I know, the only person who seems to be pissed with you is you.”

“But—”

“We need to stop doing this,” Callum interrupted.

“Sir, I’m sorry if—”

“The whole dying thing, I mean.”

“I don’t think either of us chooses to get blown up or shot,” she said. “Don’t send me away. I’ll do better next time, I promise!”

“No, no, no.” Callum put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s not what I mean. I mean let’s not do this whole bleeding on each other thing again. I don’t want you to go anywhere. I just want you to…be more careful. Seeing you like this…hurts me.”

She looked at him for a long, silent moment, then smiled. It was oddly fragile, that smile, but real.

“I hate to say this,” she said, “but I’m a little hungry.”

“Doc says you can eat…assuming you can handle sick bay food.” He rolled his eyes. “Trust me, it really sucks.”

“People keep saying how bad the food is,” she said. “They should try eating what Sam and I had to eat on Inverness.”

“Well, I guess given a bar that low even hospital chow isn’t too terrible,” he acknowledged. “I’ll get you something.”

He stood and turned toward the cubicle door, then paused. He stayed that way a moment, then turned around and slid an arm behind her shoulders. He hugged her—hard—and she closed her eyes, ducked her head, and nuzzled her cheek against his chest.



Back | Next
Framed