Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel
She felt a sudden desire to shout at him. Captain Çelik would not have bothered pretending; he would have told her flat-out that he had lied to her—or better yet, he would have been up front to begin with. “Do not tell me that this attack was not anticipated,” she continued over his objection. “You assign an additional Corps warship to this area, just before an organized Syndicate raider attack? On a scale that has not been seen in this sector in twenty years? Why is it that we were closer to Exeter than you were, Captain? Why was it that my people were first in the line of fire?”
“Exeter was first in the line of fire, Captain Shiang.”
“I am not interested in your self-righteousness,” she told him coldly. “I am not comming you to listen to more prevarication. I am comming you to let you know that once we have a tracker report from the escaped raider, we will be leaving this area, and you may pursue the criminal on your own.”
There was a brief silence. “You’re really going to ignore what happened here?”
Let him think she was foolish enough to let an organized attack pass without investigation. “Once we have given you the raider’s location, we have no intention of engaging in further contact with you or your ship.”
“Is that just Galileo, or Central in general?” She could not be certain, but she thought she caught a note of humorless dryness in his tone.
“I will accept reports on Captain Çelik’s condition,” she told him, without answering his question. “Should you find the accused raider and exact your justice, we will hear of it without your help.”
More silence. “How many Central starships have you dealt with, besides Exeter?” he asked.
Damned if she was going to tell him that. “Raiders rarely have a range of more than twelve hours,” she said. “I am expecting a signal before that time has expired. When we receive the information, we will transmit it to your ship, and our interaction will be concluded. Am I making myself understood?”
“Very clearly, Captain Shiang.”
“And please tell your Admiralty,” she added, “that they need expend no more energy trying to ease our concerns about their troop buildup here. PSI’s allegiance is to each other. We will continue to battle the Syndicates and their raiding parties as we always have—by ourselves. Your allies are your own problem. Good evening, Captain Foster.”
She cut him off and looked down to find Lin staring at her, her dark eyes wide open.
“I didn’t mean to wake you, dear,” she said gently.
Lin blinked. “Samedi?” she asked.
Guanyin carried the little girl through the interior door into her quarters. On the other side the rest of her children slept, and one room beyond that, Yunru was, with any luck, getting some hard-earned rest. Guanyin felt immeasurably better having had her say; she thought her gnawing worry over Çelik might settle enough for her to get some sleep herself.
Samedi, who had been dozing on the couch, looked up when she came in. She laid Lin gently next to him and went for a blanket. When she came back, the ordinarily irrepressible puppy had curled up against the little girl, who had hooked an arm around his neck. I should let her train Samedi, Guanyin reflected. He is certainly more mindful of her than he is of me.
She shook out the blanket and pulled it over the pair, then tugged off her own uniform to get ready for bed.
Galileo
Raman Çelik was well-known as a pragmatic man. He always saw the reality of what was before him, with all its attendant possibility and detail, and had a knack for choosing the most efficient solution to any problem. He could fix a generator or defuse a bar fight, and he always knew when it was time to cut his losses and move on. For years people had said that Captain Çelik could turn straw into gold—or bullshit into steak. He found those descriptions tiresome. People who said such things about him tended to have slow minds and no imagination, and he almost always ignored them.
His own imagination was failing him at the moment. He supposed it was medication-induced grogginess. He had known when he woke, even with his eyes closed, that he was not on Exeter. The room smelled wrong. Even in the antiseptic confines of her infirmary—and his nose told him he was in someone’s infirmary—he knew the odors of his ship.
The infirmary was on her starboard side, opposite the engine room. It would still be intact.
The engine room.
What had they been doing? His gunners were in the engine room. They had fired, and they had missed, but why? Something was wrong. They were all dead, of course, but there was something else. His own survival, perhaps. With his ship gut-shot, he should not be here. Duty dictated that he go down with her. Perhaps he had, and this sterile, odd-smelling infirmary was some sort of near-death hallucination.
He opened his eyes and squinted into the bright light of the ceiling. “Fucking hell,” he croaked, forcing his voice through his dry throat, “turn down the fucking lights.”
A man’s deep voice said something unintelligible, and the light dimmed, but not enough. A moment later, a head and shoulders appeared in his line of sight, silhouetted by the illuminated ceiling. “How are you feeling, Captain Çelik?”
Should he know the voice? “That’s a stupid fucking question,” he said. He had been drugged. He had passed out from pain and blood loss. He was supposed to be dead. Who was this idiot?
“Mentally fit, I see,” the voice said, and Raman relaxed. “How much do you remember?”
Something had happened. What had that PSI doctor said …? “I lost my leg.”
“You did,” confirmed the voice. “Doctor Xiao did a nice job of cauterizing the wound. We shouldn’t have any trouble growing you a graft. But in the meantime, it’s going to hurt like a son of a bitch.”
And just like that, Raman’s brain registered the pain: white-hot, nearly numbing, all the nerve endings screaming with nothing attached. He could feel his toes, the toes he did not have anymore. He had always thought that was a myth. “What about the rest of me?”
“Concussion, contusions, small femoral fracture, one deep cut on your back under a left rib. About what you’d expect for a firefight.”
He liked this doctor and his dry practicality. “Who are you?”
“Commander Robert Hastings, chief medical officer, CCSS Galileo,” the man said smoothly.
Raman frowned. The name was familiar. “We’ve met.”
“Three years ago, on Aleph Six.”
“Did we get on?”
“Not even a little bit.”
That made sense. Raman preferred people who were not so easy to charm. “When can I get up?”
Of all things, that question made the doctor hedge. “The drug Doctor Xiao gave you is going to be in your system for a few more hours,” he began.
Raman interrupted him with a snort. “Cut the shit, Doctor-Commander Hastings. If you don’t know, say so.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
Another pause. Raman was becoming annoyed, and it was clearing his head. “In cases such as this,” the doctor said cautiously, “the psychological aftereffects of the incident are less predictable than the physical.”
“The ‘incident’ being the crippling of my ship. The deaths of my crew.”
“Yes.”