Against the Odds

Chapter Fourteen

Barin had never seen anything like the bleak dark rock that jutted from an angry green sea. It was almost enough—almost—to make him want to be back in space. The craft settled onto the landing space with a soft bump.

The wind was icy; Barin pulled the hood of his PPU up and sealed it around his face. The prison buildings looked as grim as the rock itself. Had people really lived here? Been confined here?

“I thought it was bad before,” Corporal Meharry said. “But this is ridiculous. I want back in space.”

“How’d you get assigned here, anyway?” Barin asked.

“I asked for it, fool that I am. You know my sister was here once. Lepescu put her in. I wanted to know what it was like, what she’d been through.” He shivered, and Barin suspected it was from more than the cold wind. “Better get set up, sir, if you’ll excuse me.”

As the one person who had served here, Meharry knew where everything was, and went with forensics to find them quarters that wouldn’t interfere with the investigation. Barin had the others unload their supplies off the transport; the scientists would fly on to the weapons research station in the same craft. Margiu, he’d noticed, was with them, and a bearded fat man talked to her the whole trip. When the transport had left, he looked around the courtyard. It looked like a nightmare setting: the cold, dark, stone walls, the barred gates to the prisoner block.

He’d heard about the massacre of the prisoners who didn’t mutiny, and wondered which dark streaks on the rocks might be blood.

Meharry came back out and spoke to the other troops, who started carrying the supplies inside. Barin followed. Inside the staff block, dark stone walls gave way to ordinary paint and plaster. “They’re keeping us out of the officers’ quarters, sir,” Meharry said. “But we can use the kitchen over here; it’s a better size for this small a group.” Barin avoided the warning tape the forensic team were already stretching.

Organizing the outpost and making sure support ran smoothly occupied him for the first few days. The forensic team went about their business, whatever it was—Barin saw them collecting scrapings from various parts of the courtyard, and assumed that they were doing the same in cells and other buildings. Meharry disappeared for hours at a time, coming back white-faced and tense. Barin didn’t want to add to his discomfort by asking more questions, and tried to find solvable problems for Meharry to work on. He ventured into the prisoners’ block once himself, and came out more shaken than he wanted to admit. He’d imagined things like that in the Benignity, not here in the Familias. Not in his Fleet. He couldn’t imagine anyone in his family putting people in those holes, no matter what they’d done.

Then Corporal Meharry asked if he’d come along while Meharry pointed out details of his escape for the forensic team.

“They threw me off from up there—” Meharry pointed. “It’s a guardpost, with a good view of the inner exercise yard, and also out to sea.”

“I don’t know how you survived a fall like that into icewater,” Barin said.

“I wasn’t worried about the water,” Meharry said. “Not that much, anyway. The rocks, now . . . that and the surge. But you see, sir, I knew something was coming. I’d been telling myself, if they push, jump. Use their help, get out as far as possible. I had the PPU on, y’see.”

The forensic team wanted Meharry to reenact everything but that last leap. Barin felt almost sick just sitting in the first guardpost. The whole island seemed to shrink below him, leaving him teetering on a tiny pinhead. Meharry pointed out the rough path to the one from which he’d been thrown, scarcely protected from the seawind by a low row of stones on the seaward side. Despite his previous experience, Meharry started down the path as if he’d known it all his life. Barin forced himself up and followed, more slowly. He felt exposed and unbalanced, as if the great open space to his right and below were pulling at him, tugging him away from the safe path.

He slid into the lower guardpost with relief, and hoped it didn’t show too much. One of the forensic team had come with him; the others were back at the high post with the recorders.

“And this is where you’d seen someone down?”

“Yes—over there.” Meharry sounded a little breathless, but that could be the icy wind. Barin hoped no one would ask him a question.

“And the drop is—” The forensic tech leaned out, stiffened, and jerked back. “My God . . . it’s . . . there are rocks sticking out down there. You could’ve been killed—”

“That was the idea,” Meharry said; Barin glanced at him, and caught a flash of satisfaction on his face. He was not entirely displeased that the other man had reacted so strongly.

“Yes, but—I guess I’d better record it—” The other man brought his recorder up to his eye.

“We’d better hang on,” Meharry said. “Just in case of a wind gust.” He glanced at Barin. Barin did not want to get up and hold on to someone who might overbalance and drag him along. He knew that wasn’t likely, intellectually, but his body—

“Good idea, Corporal,” he heard himself say. He got up and took a good handful of the other man’s PPU. Meharry, beside him, did the same on the other side. Sure enough, the man leaned out, shooting downward. Wind whipped at him, shaking him; Barin and Meharry leaned back. Meharry, Barin saw, was as white as he himself felt. He was the one with the right to have the shakes here, and he was doing his job.

From there, they went back to the high post, and then back across the courtyard to the main building. Down the elevator, into the storage levels. Meharry pointed out to the forensic team where he’d hidden his own supplies, where the entrance to the lava tubes was. They clambered over the broken shards of black rock, now lit by a string of lights. It looked depressing and dangerous, but after the guardposts, Barin felt much safer inside the rock than precariously balanced on its surface.

They came around a turn, through another broken segment, into the opening where Meharry had stored his raft. It faced south; thin winter sunlight speared into the sea entrance, revealing every texture of the lava—here glassy, and there scuffed and roughened. It was curiously beautiful—the black rock, the green sea beyond. The place was full of sound—the growling boom of the sea, the hiss of foam and spray, the screech of seabirds, all echoing back and forth, side to side . . . Barin couldn’t really hear what the forensic team were asking Meharry.

He walked nearer the entrance. Out of the north wind, with the sun on him, it wasn’t nearly as cold. He saw something on the floor and squatted to look at it. Something stringy and green, and in it, a tiny many-legged thing with a scarlet shell. He had no idea what he was looking at. Closer to the opening the noise was less confusing; now he could distinguish the originals from the echoes. The outer part of the tube slanted downward a little; he stopped there, staring out into the morning.

“If it had been daylight, she’d have nailed me,” Meharry said. Barin jumped; he hadn’t heard the corporal come up behind him. “I’d have been an easy target, dragging myself over that edge.”

“How did you?” Barin asked. “It’s slippery—”

“Suit wrist and leg grapples,” Meharry said. “Push the studs there—with your thumbs—” Barin obeyed, and the bright steel sprang free.

“Some kind of special tip,” Meharry said. “Supposed to stick into most anything. This rock’s brittle, but I went slow.”

“And in the dark,” Barin said. “Did you have enhanced night vision?” He pressed the studs again and the wrist grapples retracted.

“No—guards on night duty were issued goggles, but they weren’t built into the suits. And I wasn’t on night duty when I went over.”

Barin glanced at him. Meharry spoke in a flat tone unlike his usual voice.

“Does the water ever come up this far?” Barin asked.

“Yes, sir. This planet has a solar tide, of course, and then in storms the wind can pile it up around here. Spray gets in all the time; you probably saw that seaweed back there.”

“I didn’t know what it was,” Barin said.

“Some kind of plant. There’s lots of it out there, on the rocks right at the water line.”

“It reminds me of the ship,” Barin said, almost to himself.

“Sir?”

“When the bulkhead opened—standing in the dark looking out. Then it was stars, and not a sea, but . . . never mind that. How long do you think they’re going to be?”

“Looks like they’re through,” Meharry said, looking behind them. Barin started up the tube, but Meharry didn’t follow. Barin turned and went back to him; the man’s face was taut with misery and some determination.

“Corporal, I know you said you didn’t want to come back here—let’s go back up.”

“Just—just a few minutes, sir.”

Barin’s instincts told him not to leave; he found a smooth bit of floor and sat down. “Come on over here, then; I don’t want to have to squint against the sunlight to see you.”

The sunlight that flashed off the waves almost like the sparkle of an enemy’s attack on shields, the brightness in the sky that was too much like the flare of the explosion.

Meharry came and sat near him, and began talking as if Barin had asked a question. “Thing is, sir—I can’t trust myself—”

“Trust yourself?”

“They told you I killed Commander Bacarion, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well . . . they probably didn’t tell you how.”

“No, they didn’t.” Barin wondered what was coming now.

“Sir, I—” Meharry gulped and looked away. “Being back here, it—it brings it back. It’s like—it’s like it’s still happening. Over and over.”

Barin knew that feeling, too. Meharry needed a psychnanny. Had needed one for months, most likely. But here they were, right at the site of whatever happened, with no psychnanny available and no transport out for the next several days.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I . . . don’t . . . know if I can,” Meharry said. “And anyway, you’ll—”

“I’ll listen,” Barin said. “I’ll hear you.”

“I killed her, but I never meant to. Not at first. She tried to kill me—she had the weapon—” It sounded almost impossible to Barin, that desperate struggle in the dark. “And then when I got my headlamp on, after she quit moving, I saw . . . so much blood . . . and her face . . .”

“Her face—?”

“I . . . my wrist grapples were still out, sir, and when we came to hand to hand, I just hit—and—it was all gone, sir. I—the grapples . . . just tore it off . . .” Meharry was shaking now, eyes squeezed shut, hands clenched under his armpits.

Barin reached out and gripped Meharry’s arm. He wanted to say something, but he knew he had to wait.

“It’s—I never thought of myself like that, sir. Someone who’d attack like that. An officer. A woman. But I did it. I can’t pretend I didn’t, and if I did it once . . . and then I thought of my sister, when she was in prison here. What had Methi done, what did she have to do to survive? I mean, she’s my sister, and she . . . and I . . .”

“I met your sister once,” Barin said. “On my aunt’s ship. She’s a fine person.” She was also a dangerous killer, he was sure, but that wasn’t what Meharry needed to hear right now.

“I thought of asking for a psych-out, sir. When I realized what I’d done, how evil it was. That I was just like Bacarion. But right then they needed everyone, and I thought—I hoped—I could keep it under control. Only now, coming back here, it’s all right now again, just like I was afraid of. I can’t—what if I do it again?”

Barin choked back the first easy reassurances, the Of course you won’t and You’ll be fine, don’t worry that sprang automatically to his lips. Would he believe that if someone told him? Would he never again make the mistakes he’d made? He wished someone else were here, someone with more experience. Heris would know how to talk to this good man, or his grandmother. Or Esmay, what would she say?

“I guess—you understand, sir, why I’m going to have to leave—” Meharry opened his eyes, staring straight out to sea. “It’s all right, Lieutenant. Just go on back up and let me sit here and think things out awhile.”

“No,” Barin said, putting all the command into it he could. He had lost Ghormley; he was not going to lose Meharry. “No, I’m not going to go back upstairs and let you throw yourself into the sea to die.”

Meharry turned toward him, eyes wide with shock.

“If you’re ever faced with another murderous mutineer commander trying to kill you in the dark, Gelan—” He saw the effect of that use of the first name. “If you ever have to fight hand-to-hand like that again, I hope you will do exactly what you did. If she had killed you, and completed her plans, we’d all have been a lot worse off. You didn’t rip her face off”—he used the brutal term intentionally—“for any of the reasons she’d have done it. If you’d had a weapon, you’d have shot her dead, clean and quick. But you didn’t.”

“But—”

“And if you ever have to do it again, which we both hope you won’t, I trust you will feel the same anguish you’ve felt since, because you aren’t like her—like any of them. You don’t take pleasure in cruelty. It was a horrible situation, and what you had to do to survive is something no decent person could be proud of—but the survival mattered. It matters now. I’m not going to let you destroy it.”

Meharry still trembled, but it felt different under Barin’s hand, a definite change.

“I . . . have nightmares.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised. Have you talked to the psychnannies about it?”

“No—I didn’t think it was their kind of problem. I mean, it’s a moral thing.”

“When I was captured,” Barin said, “it wasn’t nearly as bad as this, but I had a rough time afterwards. Nightmares, seeing those men—”

“You were captured, sir?”

“Yeah. I was on a deepspace repair vessel, Koskiusko—”

“The one the Bloodhorde tried for?”

“That very one. They got some personnel aboard, impersonating Fleet personnel from a damaged ship. By the time our people realized they were imposters, they were loose in the ship. They got me when I went to inventory for some parts my boss wanted . . .” He stopped, remembering more than he wanted of the next hours and days.

“What did they—? I mean, if you want to say, sir.”

“I think the worst,” Barin said, “was feeling so damned helpless. They had me trussed up, dragged me around like a parcel. They killed three people in front of me, one of them a woman they raped first. And I couldn’t do a thing . . . me, a Fleet officer, a blinkin’ Serrano. I’d always thought, if something happened, I’d react well, solve the problem. And here they’d knocked me cold before I realized anything was wrong, and . . .”

“But you couldn’t help it—”

“No, but that didn’t keep me from feeling guilty and thinking I should have done something. Thing is, I got some help with all that afterwards. Didn’t want to go; was sure it wouldn’t work, just be a black mark on my record. Thought the nightmares and so on were just punishment for being an incompetent young twit.”

“It really helped?”

“It really helped. Took awhile. Involved going into all sorts of other stuff I thought was totally irrelevant. But it did help.”

“Maybe I should . . .”

“I think so. At least give it a try before you quit on it. There are always ways to die, if it doesn’t work.”

“There is that, sir.” Meharry sat up straighter, stretched his arms. “Sorry—I shouldn’t have—”

“What, bothered me? What else are jigs for?” Barin let his tone go lighter. “Of course you’re supposed to bother me. It’s part of my training. If you want to make master chief someday, you’ll have to recognize your duty to bother young officers.”

Meharry managed a shaky laugh. “I . . . can’t imagine making master chief right now, sir.”

“Well, I can’t imagine making admiral, but given the way your family and mine tend to mature, maybe we’d better start working on it.”

“Do you think . . . they all have this kind of thing to deal with?”

“Bad memories, times they feel they screwed up? I guess . . . I never really thought about it, but . . . I know my aunt does. She doesn’t talk about it to me.”

“No, nor Methi with me.” Meharry took a long breath, then another. “Sir, thanks. I was . . . just purely desperate.”

“I know. And it may come back, at least until you get some treatment. But you’re a lot more than one blow in the dark, Gelan Meharry.”

“And you’re a lot more than one mistake in damage control,” Meharry said, with an accuracy that took Barin’s breath away. “I’ll bet you did the best you could—and you were tryin’ to save lives—maybe you’d have lost people anyway.”

“It’s still my responsibility.”

Meharry cocked his head. “So tell me about it. You listened to me; I’ll listen to you.”

This wasn’t in any leadership manual, and he was dead sure his aunt had never been in a situation like this. But he had demanded trust; now he had to give it. That much he knew, bone-deep.

“All right. There was the hull breach, aft of the compartment I was working in . . .”

“Don’t they usually have a chief running that?”

“The rejuv problem,” Barin said. “Not enough chiefs, too many jigs. Actually our station was up on Troop Deck, but they needed all of us. So there I was, with my team. Enough of the bulkhead between us and the hull breach had spalled off to send shrapnel through the compartment, causing a lot of damage, plus there was a leak to vacuum. When we went in, it was dark, cold, wet, slippery, and you couldn’t see more’n a meter at first.”

“Sounds like a bad stormy night here,” Meharry said.

“What I worried most about was a hydraulic leak,” Barin said. “I’d been warned about those, and sure enough, there was one. And then, whether the bulkhead would hold—it was strained, and that’s where the air was going.” He told the next part quickly—how they’d put up the big patch, how they’d been told to go on and check the environmental tanks.

“Did you have moles in your unit?” Meharry asked.

“No; they were sending us some moles, they said, but in the meantime we could look at gauges and read them off. We had one guy with a chemscan . . .” He stopped, swallowed. “So we rigged emergency lighting. The deck was wet, of course, and part of it was icy as well. Pressure was way down, and the temperature.”

“Was the fight still going on?”

“Yeah. But we were too busy to pay much attention. What I should have known was that we had the wrong kind of chemscan; the one we had was fine for the rest of the ship, but didn’t identify organics. There was a spike . . .” He went on with the rest, gesturing to show where everyone had been, and what he’d tried to do. “I couldn’t move, you see. Not without moving the oxygen around—it’s dispersing all the time, of course, but moving would make it happen faster. And Ghormley, he was the youngest, the newest. I didn’t realize—I thought I’d convinced him to stand still, but he thought I was moving—”

“He triggered it?” Meharry said.

“He was scared,” Barin said. “I guess when I turned my head away from him, he thought we were leaving him alone, but I wouldn’t have—”

“Of course not,” Meharry said. “If you were that kind you’d have bolted for the airlock first thing, and blown them all up.” He pursed his lips. “Kid should have listened to you.”

“I said the wrong things,” Barin said.

“I doubt it. You kept him there longer than he’d have stayed on his own, right? An’ then he panicked. In the dark and cold, knowing he was standing in something that could blow him to bits . . . I can understand that, though he was wrong.”

“I couldn’t stop him,” Barin said. “And if I’d known what I should have about the chemscan, it wouldn’t have happened anyway—we’d have known it was a methane leak right off. Two people dead, several injured, because I thought Environmental was boring. . . .”

“I guess you do know about guilt,” Meharry said. “So how did you survive, standing in the oxygen?”

“Blind luck,” Barin said. “I don’t know, really—I was knocked cold—but they said the explosion jammed me in between a couple of tanks. I came out fine.” The bitterness in his own voice surprised him.

Meharry’s eyebrows went up. “Fine? A medical evacuation here, and how many hours in the regen tanks?” He blew out a long breath. “With all due respect, sir, I think if I need the psychnannies, maybe you do too.”

“Maybe I do,” Barin said. Now he’d let it out, he could see the resemblance to his earlier experience, when he’d felt so inadequate because he couldn’t save them all. “Sauce for the goose, eh? So neither of us gets to jump into the ocean. It’s a deal, is it?”

“Deal, sir.” They shook hands on it; Barin had the sense that he was shaking hands on another deal, one he didn’t quite understand yet.

Captain Terakian offered to let Esmay stay aboard, but she felt she had abused their hospitality enough.

“You will stay in touch?” he said. “I feel responsible—”

“I’ll be fine,” Esmay said. “Whether they let me back in or not, I’ll be fine. And yes, I’ll let you know.”

Rockhouse Major had hostelries in every style and price range; Esmay checked into a modest hotel where she could afford to stay for weeks, if need be. She put her few clothes away, grimaced at the thought of having to shop for more, and went out to find a communications nexus. There she looked up “Brun Meager” in the Rockhouse Major database, and found long strings of news stories about her, but no address. She found the address subdirectory and tried again. Restricted. Well, that made sense. She entered “Brun Meager, agent of record” and got a name she’d never heard of: “Katherine Anne Briarly.” A search on that returned only a comunit number. Esmay copied it to her handcomp, moved to a secure combooth, and entered the number. A screen came up with a message: “Sorry, it’s the middle of the night here. If this is an emergency, please press 0; otherwise press 1 and put a message in my morning bin.”

Option 1 gave her more choices: voice, text, video. Esmay chose voice and waited until the return signal came. “This is Esmay Suiza, formerly of the Regular Space Service,” she said. “I need to contact Brun Meager; I’m presently at Rockhouse Major, at the Stellar Inn, room 1503.”

She wasn’t even sure which time zone Brun was in—assuming she was in this system at all. She walked back to the Stellar Inn, wondering if she should have stayed aboard the Fortune—was she really wasting money, as Goonar had said? But the very anonymity and blandness of the hotel’s rooms—the dull colors and plain surfaces, so different from the Terakians’ decor—helped her think through what it was she wanted to tell Brun, and what she thought Brun might be able to do. It seemed less practical here and now.

She stretched out on the beige—and-cream bedspread, and turned down the light. She might as well try to sleep. . . .

The comunit’s beep woke her from a dream about Altiplano—not Barin for once—where she had been, for some dream-logical reason, sitting in an apple tree plaiting multicolored ribbons while children sang jingles down below. She reached for the comunit and eyed the time display. Six hours after she’d come back to the room—she’d had more than enough sleep.

“Esmay Suiza?” a woman’s voice said. It didn’t sound like Brun, but her voice had still been hoarse and scratchy when Esmay heard it last.

“Yes,” she said.

“This is Kate Briarley. Does your room have a secure comunit?”

“No—there’s one in the lobby.”

“Here’s my day number—”

In the secure booth, Esmay entered the number she’d been given. The screen lit almost at once, and the video pickup showed both Brun—still unmistakeably Brun—and another blonde woman who looked to be a few years older.

“Esmay—what’s this I hear about you leaving Fleet? Did you quit, or did they boot you out?”

“Booted me out,” Esmay said, unaccountably cheered by Brun’s matter-of-fact tone. “You wouldn’t have heard—Barin and I got married—”

“Good for you! Is that why?”

“Yes . . . it’s all rather complicated. I wanted to talk to you, if I could.”

“Ah—you haven’t met Kate—” Brun nodded at the other woman. “Kate Briarly’s from the Lone Star Confederation, and she’s been helping me out, including with security. What with the assassinations and all, we’re being careful.”

“That’s good,” Esmay said.

“But you need to come on down, so we can talk. There’s a twice-daily shuttle to Rockhouse Minor, which is all civilian; lots of people take it just to sightsee, and there are excursions to the planet from there, too. When you get to Rockhouse Minor, go to section B, give the guard at the private entrance your name, and say you’re expected. You’ll be passed through to a departure lounge for private shuttles. No one will bother you.” She turned to Kate. “Should we go up and meet her?”

“I’d let your staff handle it,” Kate said.

“Fine, then. A steward will tell you when the shuttle’s ready . . . let me see . . . you can catch the Rockhouse Minor shuttle in about three hours—”

“If it’s not full,” Esmay said. “Is it usually booked in advance?”

“Yes, but it’s usually half-empty anyway. Tell the concierge—they have some pull with the transit companies. Anyway, if you catch that one, then it’ll be about two hours after you arrive before someone will be there to pick you up.”

Rockhouse Minor was quieter than Rockhouse Major . . . less bustling. Esmay strolled down carpeted corridors bordered by exclusive shops with window displays arranged like works of art: small, jeweled, entrancing. Here a single shoe, draped with ropes of pearls. There a scarf, behind a diamond necklace. An antique chronometer, a crystal decanter.

Section B turned out to be even more luxurious—the carpet, deeper piled, curved halfway up the bulkheads, and padded seats faced a series of aquaria, each housing a collection of rare marine life. The Lassaferan snailfish, with its elongated purple fin, looked as improbable as its name.

Ahead was a barrier in the form of a huge work of fabric art, with a guard kiosk in front of a gap in the fabric. The guard appeared to be alone and unarmed, but Esmay doubted this was the case.

“May I help you, sera?” the guard asked as she walked up.

“Yes, thank you. I’m Esmay Suiza. I’m expected.” She felt silly saying this, even though it was true.

“Ah . . . yes. Excuse me, Sera Suiza, but may I see your identification?”

Esmay handed over the folder, and he checked it over. “If you would just put the fingers of both hands here . . .” She did so. “Thank you, sera; sorry to have delayed you. Go right on through.”

As she passed through the opening, Esmay saw that immediately behind the tapestry was a large, efficiently-laid-out guardroom where a half-dozen uniformed personnel manned scan equipment, including a full-spec scan of the corridor she had just come down.

Ahead, in the lounge area, were more clusters of padded chairs as well as an area with tables and desks. She saw a couple of people chatting at a table . . . an older man lounging in one of the chairs . . . and no one else. She chose a chair, and sank into it. Almost at once, a green-vested steward came to her. “Would the sera care for any refreshments?”

“No, thank you,” Esmay said. Whatever they served here would no doubt cost four times as much as the same food and drink somewhere else.

“Sera Meager wanted to be sure you were comfortable,” the steward said. “This is the Barraclough private lounge, sera, and all refreshment is complimentary. There has been a slight delay in the shuttle; it will be several hours . . .”

She’d eaten at Rockhouse Major before she left, but that was now hours ago. “I don’t suppose you have soup . . .” she said.

“Indeed we do, sera,” said the steward, now looking more cheerful. By the time the shuttle arrived, Esmay decided that if she couldn’t get back into Fleet, she wanted to work for someone who had this kind of life. She could easily get used to such luxuries.

The shuttle came in low over rolling hills, green fields and orchards . . . .much greener than her part of Altiplano, with no soaring mountains nearby. As the shuttle eased down, she saw a small stone building and a few groundcars, then—as it rolled to a stop—she saw two blonde women waving. Esmay braced herself for the impact of Brun’s personality as the steward opened the shuttle door. Brun would have her own agenda for Esmay’s visit; she needed Brun’s help, but staying on track might be a problem. I’m not here to talk about fashion, she rehearsed mentally. I’m here to get into Fleet.