Nobody moved.

  It was Morton who went over to examine him. He lay exactly as he had fallen, his body a slack bundle of limbs.

  LaCruz approached cautiously, her weapon still raised.

  “You okay, doctor?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She twitched the muzzle in Blumire’s direction. “What about him? Is he dead?”

  “I seriously hope so.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Webster waited until the next day before going to visit Faulkner. By that time, they were well away from the strictures of the Prax shipping lanes and he was more than happy to leave Ross to bring them up to standard operating speed. Word about the destruction of the Yakutian vessel had spread quickly among the crew, but while everyone else was celebrating, Webster couldn’t help wondering if he might perhaps have handled things differently.

  Faulkner was asleep when he arrived at sick bay but he decided to wait around on the off chance that he might wake up and, a little over ten minutes later, Faulkner duly obliged.

  Faulkner indicated the jug of water on his nightstand and Webster poured him a glass.

  “Well, it’s good to see that they’re looking after you down here.”

  “Oh they’re very good at that. They think I’m an invalid.”

  Webster laughed.

  Faulkner took a sip of his drink, the glass shaking slightly.

  Webster said, “I’ve been going over the footage from the cameras in the cargo bay with Major Rawlins, trying to piece things together and I wondered if you wouldn’t mind answering a couple of questions.”

  “Fine, as long as you understand I’ve got one or two questions of my own.”

  That gave Webster a moment’s pause but then he pulled up a chair and sat down.

  “I must say, you had us worried for a while back there.”

  Faulkner dismissed his concerns with a gesture. “This man: Blumire? He was taking an appalling risk.”

  “Taking you hostage?”

  “No. These people he was working with. These pirates or whatever it is they call themselves nowadays. I’ve had my own dealings with these groups in the past. Totally unscrupulous. He must have been out of his mind to think he could make a deal with them and walk away with their money.”

  Webster adjusted part of the bedding. “Can’t say that I’d thought much about it.”

  “It’s always best to know who you’re dealing with. Mr Blumire was not very smart. Desperate perhaps, but smart? No. What do we know about him?”

  “Very little other than what it says in his service record. Lots of minor disciplinary issues all to do with either gambling or gambling debts. The man had his problems but never stayed in one posting long enough for it to be properly flagged up.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until now. Can I say though, sir, throughout all of this, I thought you handled yourself admirably.”

  “For an invalid?”

  “Not at all. Dr Morton told us how cleverly you played him. He seriously underestimated you. I think we all did.”

  Faulkner gave him a thin smile. “Yes, well, I think I owe her an apology. In trying to win Blumire’s trust, I had to make out that she was expendable.”

  “I’m sure she’ll forgive you. My issue is with Corporal Jackson’s conduct. There’s obviously going to have to be a hearing of some kind.”

  “Into what?”

  “Petty Officer Blumire was a serving member of the Syracuse. There’s a question to be answered about whether he was unlawfully killed.”

  Faulkner’s eyes narrowed. “But the man fired first.”

  “Makes no difference. Corporal Jackson was out of line. She shouldn’t have even been there. Rawlins was organising his own team at the time.”

  “And he would have turned up a day late and a dollar short. No matter how you look at it, that woman saved my life, not to mention the doctor’s.”

  “I understand. But, like I said, Jackson had no reason being there. She’d been ordered to report to the armoury. An order she chose to ignore. Master Sergeant Rawlins wants to throw the book at her.”

  “Well, can’t you do something?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. Did you hear her shout anything before she fired? A warning perhaps?”

  Faulkner pushed himself into a sitting position. “A warning? Yes. I’m sure she must have.”

  “Good. Only there’s no microphones down in the cargo bay. Too much background noise. And there’s not much to see of Jackson on the surveillance footage. So, if you could mention that to Lieutenant-Commander Ross. He’s putting together all the evidence for the investigation.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that. If you ask me, Corporal Jackson deserves a commendation not a dressing down.”

  An understanding seemed to pass between them. They both knew how these investigations were supposed to go.

  Faulkner said, “But what about you? What’s going to happen about the pirate ship you destroyed?”

  “I don’t know,” Webster groped for words. “The Yakutians are saying that they weren’t pirates but were crew members from one of their ships on a routine mission.”

  “Crewmembers who were in the act of boarding this vessel.”

  “That’s going to be difficult to prove. The Indra’s captain maintains that they were operating in international space when we opened fire without warning.”

  Faulkner clicked his teeth together. “I see. How many ‘crewmen’ were lost?”

  “Eight.”

  “Have they released their names and rank yet?”

  “No. Why? Is that important?”

  “My guess is that they weren’t normal crew members. Not on a mission as sensitive as this.”

  “What? You’re thinking special forces?”

  “Something like that. My release was down to political expediency in the end but I’m sure there are a lot of groups, particularly in the military, who’d prefer it if I wasn’t around.”

  “So what do you think will happen next?”

  “I’m not sure but you’d best watch out, Commander. You’ve dented their pride. And that’s not something the Yakutians will forget in a hurry.”

  *

  Morton stood on the ship’s observation deck. Lincoln Station was still sixty thousand kilometres away, a bright bauble suspended in space. It was possible to make out the various docking facilities which surrounded the station and she could study these in detail using the ship’s optical ranging system. So it was that she could watch the activity within the shipyards and then pan across to pick out newly arrived ships and follow them as they made their way towards their berths. The station was surrounded by a formidable range of defensive fortifications, from manned battle stations to remote laser platforms. Milling amongst these was the usual array of mining transports, industrial freighters and thousands of commercial spacecraft.

  For a combination of political and economic reasons, she knew that a good percentage of that traffic would be Yakutian. But while the war might have been over twenty years ago that didn’t mean that the suspicion and distrust felt by both sides had disappeared. Morton herself had neither forgotten nor forgiven. She still harboured a deeply held resentment over the death of her husband and doubted that a day would come when that would change.

  During the war, she’d risen to the rank of Surgeon Captain, but that was all behind her now. Now she focussed on the physical rehabilitation of wounded servicemen. She was constantly hearing them being counselled to move on with their lives and to forgive their former enemies as a way of coming to terms with their own situation. However, while she recognised that this was a useful lesson for some it wasn’t one that she was prepared to accept for herself.

  Of course, she never vocalised these opinions. It would have brought her into conflict with too many of her colleagues, people whose opinions she greatly respected. But that didn’t mean that she agreed with them on everything. She just knew that their advice was not for her.

  It might have been different, she thought, if she’d been an active combatant during the war and been injured in some way. If the injury had been physical and directly personal to her she might have been able to re-build her life and move on.

  But for her, the loss of her husband, Paul, was different. They had been trying for a family at the time and on his last visit home she had succeeded in getting pregnant. The war was coming to a close and so she decided to wait until Paul returned before sharing the news with him. She hated the idea of telling him over a face-time link. But then, a month before the end of the war, his ship, the Pegasus, and three others were involved in an engagement with a fleet of seven Yakutian ships.

  His ship was tasked with providing protection for a destroyer. Accounts of what happened were patchy, with even those who had survived failing to agree fully on the details of what had occurred. But it seemed that the Yakutian admiral leading the flotilla had become enraged by what he saw as the Pegasus’ spoiling tactics. He wanted the destroyer to turn and engage them and when that didn’t happen he instructed the other ships in his command to direct their fire towards the Pegasus. The ship suffered a series of catastrophic hits, effectively crippling her. With the destroyer long gone and the Pegasus unable to return fire, the Yakutian admiral had insisted that the barrage continue. Paul had been a gunnery officer and, when the compartment he was in was breeched by enemy fire, he and the rest of his team were sucked out into space.

  Most of the men, Paul included, had been wearing pressure suits and, having survived the initial depressurisation, would have had a good chance of being rescued. That is, if the fleet admiral hadn’t given the order to deploy a trail of anti-personnel mines as his ships departed. Both sides covered up the deployment of such mines but in the last stages of the war they had been used extensively.

  None of the men from Paul’s section was recovered alive. Paul’s body was never found. Space is to that extent an unfillable graveyard. But she didn’t blame the Yakutians. No, she blamed the man who had given the order to drop those mines: Admiral Sergai Nurgaliv of the Yakutian Naval League.

  “Doctor Morton, I hope I’m not intruding?”

  LaCruz Jackson was standing behind her, seeming relaxed on the vertiginously transparent floor. Morton made the mistake of looking down and her head started to swim. Losing a sense of ‘down’ was one of the first things you had to get used to in the navy but Morton had never mastered it. That was why she kept her exposure to weightless environments to a minimum. She was fortunate in that, being a doctor, it was rare for her to have to operate in such conditions.

  Morton straightened herself up, grasped the observation rail and fixed her gaze on the constancy of Lincoln Station.

  “Not long now,” she said, willing her nausea to fade.

  “Where do you go next?” LaCruz asked. “I imagine this isn’t a regular posting for you.”

  “And you’d be right. I’ll just go back to my regular job in the CC though I’m planning to take a few days leave first.”

  “Good idea, you’ll probably need a chance to clear your head after all that’s happened.”

  Morton said, “I’m lucky. I’ve got access to a very good counsellor through the CC. Although there is one thing that I was meaning to ask you. I’ll understand if you don’t want to say anything, but I spent all last night going over this in my head. This Blumire person, I know he was a threat and everything but was it really necessary for you to – you know …”

  “Kill him?” LaCruz suddenly stiffened. “I’m not sure. Can’t say that I thought too much about it at the time. Not since, if I’m honest.”

  Morton considered this. “Look, I’m not trying to be judgmental, I’m just trying to understand what happened. You’re obviously much better equipped to deal with these situations than I am. My question is: couldn’t you have shot him in the leg or something? That way, at least we’d have been able to question him.”

  LaCruz smiled, though not, Morton thought, because the question amused her. It was more to do with how naïve it must have sounded.

  “Listen, doctor, when I draw down on someone it’s usually because lives are in danger. Could be me, could be one of my squad mates. Either way, I’m not looking to wing the other guy. I’m looking to put him down, plain and simple. This guy Blumire wasn’t fooling around. He wouldn’t have thought twice about shooting you if he thought that would get him what he wanted. I’d like to say I shot him in the head because I knew that a precise shot would shut down his nervous system real quick and stop him from firing again. But I’d be lying. I didn’t have time to think about any of that. Once I was convinced that no one else was in my line of fire, it was all pretty automatic. I just shot him.”

  “And you’d do it again?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  “Then, thank you.”

  LaCruz’ mouth twisted in embarrassment. “For what?”

  “Saving my life. Simple as that. Thank you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  They stood uneasily side by side watching Lincoln Station growing steadily larger. Morton was pleased with how their exchange had gone. She didn’t want to appear ungrateful for what LaCruz had done but it was important she asked the question: could the outcome have been a different?

  She’d seen the man’s blaster afterwards, lying on the floor. She’d had plenty of time to study it while the Marines had secured the area. How had he managed to get hold of something like that? Probably had to smuggle it on board, which suggested that a good deal of planning had gone into this. Whoever it was who wanted to get their hands on Faulkner was willing to go to great lengths to achieve it.

  But to what end?

  Morton said, “I hear that your Master Sergeant Rawlins has been trying to make things difficult for you. Is there anything I could do to help?”

  LaCruz blew out through her lips.

  “No, that’s fine. The master sergeant’s likely pissed because I ruined his big plans. The one thing that’s going to make things worse is if some navy staffers start leaning on him to come up with a different solution. The master sergeant wouldn’t respond well to that.”

  “Even if it came from Captain Faulkner?”

  “Like I said: the less said, the better. The worst that’s going to happen is he puts me on a charge. And that I can live with.”

  “That hardly seems fair after everything you’ve done.”

  “Welcome to the Marine Corps, ma’am. ‘Fair’ ain’t got nothing to do with it. Disregard orders and you’d best prepare yourself for the consequences. I’ve had to put up with much worse than this, so I’d take it as a personal favour to me if you’d agree to stay out of it.”

  The two women shook hands on it.

  After the woman had gone, Morton stood holding the handrail so that she could gently bang her head against the glass.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The ship shuddered as it burned off excess velocity on its approach to Lincoln Station. The process had been repeated several times in the last hour in an effort to lessen the harsh effects of a more marked deceleration. Even with gravity suppressers in place, the process proved too much for some of the crew who needed to make an unscheduled visit to the heads.

  Webster realised that he wasn’t looking forward to his arrival at the space port and this surprised him. He usually enjoyed his furloughs away from the ship and Lincoln was a place he knew well. The officers’ accommodation was one of the nicer ones he’d stayed in, plus the station had not one but two fencing clubs.

  It had been his fencing more than anything else, which had helped him secure his place at the Academy. His grades might have been more than good enough but the Academy had an arduous selection procedure which he’d already failed twice before. He had been close to giving up when someone asked him if he’d considered the fencing route. Having fenced in high school he was aware of the Officer’s Cup which drew entries from all over the Confederation. What he hadn’t realised was that the navy offered a number of scholarships to any fencer who medalled in any of the categories. Webster found himself a coach who thought he might have chance in the epee category.

  Normally, the fencers practiced with an inert foil leading up to a championship but Webster’s coach was old school. He insisted on Webster using a live foil from day one. It had been the toughest thing he’d ever done and, more than once, he’d contemplated throwing it all in but he’d persevered. The transformation in the quality of his fencing had been remarkable, so much so that he started to believe that he might actually have a chance.

  Unfortunately, after winning every bout, he was beaten in the quarterfinals after spraining his ankle. He thought he’d blown his chance until someone pulled out of the navy team and his coach put his name forward. With a heavily strapped ankle, Webster made it all the way through to the final from where his team, against all expectations, went on to win. Webster’s scholarship was confirmed.

  He went on to compete as part of the Academy fencing team but he never came close to repeating that same level of success. Now, as a serving officer, his fencing was limited largely to VR opponents so when on the few occasions that he got to fence with flesh and blood opponents he jumped at the chance.

  But that wouldn’t be the case this time. He was too distracted by what was happening with the investigation to think about much else. If this went badly then there was a very good chance that he could be stripped of his commission. He hoped - with Toby Ross in charge of gathering evidence - that that could be avoided, although everything would now depend on how aggressively the Yakutians pursued his case.

  As he watched the Syracuse’s pilot bring the ship into dock, Webster still wasn’t able to shake off the sense of unease he’d experienced ever since they’d engaged the Yakutian ship.

  Something sinister was lurking just over the horizon. Of that, he was in no doubt.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” Ross had appeared by his side and was all smiles. “But your presence is required out on the quarterdeck.”