Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel
muddleheaded psychiatrist. Please don’t call it ‘the incident.’ It was an attack, a battle, and Exeter lost. That we will remedy that situation is not in question. Are we clear here?”
“Yes, sir.” Hastings sounded unhappy, but he was, as Raman had guessed, a practical man.
“Good. Now when can I get up?”
“Six hours.”
“I’ll need a temporary prosthetic.”
“I can’t recommend that, sir.”
Good Lord, he had forgotten how aggravating doctors could be. “Why would that be?”
“A prosthetic that is not specifically grown for your physiology will be uncomfortable, and by its nature not properly functional.”
“That’s acceptable for a temporary.”
“Exactly, Captain. But if it stays on too long, or if it’s damaged while it’s grafted to you, we’d be looking at an above-the-knee amputation and a much more complicated growth for a permanent fix. Recovery time will be months instead of weeks, and you may never see full mobility out of the device.”
“What’s too long?”
Hastings shook his head, defeated. “Three days. Possibly four, if you don’t damage it. But I can’t give you painkillers while you’re wearing it, sir. They’ll interfere with the electrical impulses and you won’t be able to control it.”
Raman took a moment to let the heat of his missing leg wash over him, and his head swam. “Will it hurt more or less than it does now?”
“Less,” Hastings said. “Probably.”
“How long will it take you to attach it?”
“An hour, maybe a little more.”
Raman nodded. “Proceed then, Doctor,” he said, letting his eyes close again. “And when you’re finished, and you can see your way clear to letting me get the fuck out of here, I will speak with my crew standing on my own two feet. So to speak.”
He heard nothing for a moment, and then he heard the shuffle of feet as Hastings turned and walked away. Definitely practical, Raman thought. Practical people were so much more useful than empathic ones.
Greg poured a generous measure of whisky into the glass on his desk, and nudged it in the direction of the officer sitting across from him. “Start from the beginning, Commander.”
Dmitri Keita glanced briefly at Elena, seated beside him, before reaching out and lifting the glass. He sniffed it first, then raised his eyebrows and sipped. Greg was surprised; Commander Keita had not struck him as a connoisseur. Under the circumstances he would have expected the man to gulp the liquid, but even traumatized he clearly recognized quality. Greg felt briefly ashamed of the amount of the stuff he had guzzled unceremoniously when he was still drinking.
Quality had not mattered to him at all.
When Elena brought Keita to his office, Greg had resisted the urge to call the man “son.” Despite being only three years younger than Greg, and fully as tall, there was something in his face: an earnest innocence that suggested vulnerability. Elena had hovered over him like a worried parent, which had puzzled Greg at first. All he knew of Keita was what he had read in her official report of the incident on Canberra, nearly eight years ago now. She had not seemed protective of Keita in the report. Indeed, she had emphasized the team’s dependence on his strategy and marksmanship, and his bravery when rescuing the infant. Over the years she had spoken only obliquely of Canberra, and almost never of Keita, although Greg knew she kept in loose touch with him.
She perched on the edge of her chair now, leaning toward Exeter’s second-in-command, her eyebrows firmly knit together, fairly vibrating with focus on her old friend. An unwelcome thought wandered into Greg’s head, and the urge to call the man “son” vanished, replaced by the need to keep the exchange professional and as brief as possible.
Keita took a breath and leaned back, his hand still curled around the whisky. “We were back on Earth three weeks ago, a little after you were,” he said. “Everyone was still talking about you two, but nobody really understood everything that happened. At least nobody at my rank.” He was quiet a moment, and Greg wondered if Keita thought he would elaborate. “Nobody much thought about MacBride—his trial was a lot less high-profile than yours, and he never had your … celebrity. Sir.” Keita shifted, and Greg sensed disapproval. “But most of us figured, well, he’d screwed up, and someone was taking care of it. Right? Because that’s what we do. We figure out how to punish people, and we do it, and it’s sane and sensible and all in the interests of the Greater Good.” Greg heard the emphasis in his bitter voice.
“And I wouldn’t have thought about it at all anymore, but the day before we left Captain Çelik called me into his office, took everything off the record, and told me we were going to be transporting Captain MacBride to the prison system out by Xihoudu. I didn’t understand why it needed to be secret, but I didn’t ask.”
Greg interrupted. “Who else was assigned to the task?”
“Initially, only me, Farias the brig officer, and Doctor Lawson, but Lawson had to pull in a team.” He turned to Elena. “That’s how Jimmy got involved.”
“Why did you need a med team?”
Keita shifted and dropped his eyes, taking a moment to sip the whisky. “They transferred him to us unconscious, sir. Drugged. Told us he needed to be fed intravenously, because he’d been on a hunger strike.”
That, Greg thought, made no sense at all. What could MacBride have hoped to gain from a hunger strike? “Did your doctor confirm that?”
Keita nodded. “But that’s not why he brought Jimmy—Doctor Youda in. Lawson let the drugs wear off the first afternoon. Said he wanted to examine MacBride, and he wasn’t going to do it while the man couldn’t speak for himself. And … as soon as he woke up, Captain MacBride started ranting. Screaming about being set up, about injustice, calling the Admiralty a pack of cowardly murderers. That sort of thing.”
Now that, Greg thought, sounds like MacBride. “Who heard him?”
“I did, sir. And Doc Lawson, and Jimmy.”
“What did you do?”
“Doc Lawson drugged him again,” Keita said, and Greg thought he disapproved of that as well. “He told me MacBride was a danger to himself. But he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he said it.”
Lawson’s name, Greg remembered, had been on the casualty list. If he had known more than Keita about what was going on, he could tell no one now. “What makes you think the attack was over MacBride?”
Keita’s eyes met Elena’s again, and Greg saw her nod, almost imperceptibly. “It’s an anomaly, and I suppose I am assuming the anomalies are all related. Using a starship to transport MacBride, the Syndicate attack on a Corps ship, their disproportionate firepower—” He stopped there, and Greg wondered if he was including Exeter’s feeble attempts at self-defense in his mental list. Instead, he added something that required more imagination than Greg would have initially suspected of him. “And the timing, sir.”
“Timing?”
“I’m not privy to most of it, sir, but Captain Çelik does talk.” He exchanged another glance with Elena. “You being here in the Third Sector, after you were exonerated.” Greg didn’t correct him. “And nobody understanding exactly what happened out there with PSI, or even really what MacBride did or didn’t do. Captain Çelik says nobody can even cogently explain why he was court-martialed.”
“Incitement to war,” Greg said automatically. In reality, of course, it