Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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      Up close she could make out more details. The clothing it was wearing was dark brown, thick and sturdy cloth, but nothing like an environmental suit. Not a Corps uniform, which meant it was one of the raiders. Some kind of infiltrator caught in the blast? Piloting one of the ships she had thought was a drone? She tugged him forward, examining the alcove she had pulled him out of. She could see nests of fibers and polymer sheets moved to one side. The body had been shoved there after the blast. And from the look of the remains … he had been alive when he had been exposed to the vacuum.

      She hooked her arm through his rigid elbow and pulled on her tether, hauling herself back through the opening. The abrupt gravity yanked the body from her grip, and she caught at him, unable to prevent him from dropping, stiff and undignified, to the floor. She stepped over him, leaning against the wall.

      “I’m not a medic, but it sure looks like death by decompression,” she told Greg. “If he hasn’t got an ident chip, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting a name.”

      “Don’t go back out there alone, Chief,” he said. “That’s an order.”

      An emotional one, she thought, then looked down at the corpse. Inhuman, at this stage, distorted and hideous.

       Murderer.

      “Yes, sir,” she acknowledged. She was far too close to all of this, and Greg knew it, too.

      “Chief?” Darrow said. “You inside?”

      “Yes. Where are you?”

      “Aft. By the brig. We found two more bodies, ma’am, one raider, and one of Exeter’s people, but we’ve got one alive. One of ours. Looks like he was guarding the brig, but it’s been blasted open.”

      She began heading down the hallway. “Had it been inhabited?”

      “Hard to tell, and the officer isn’t talking yet.”

      She rounded the corner, and came across the raider first. Despite being free of the ravages of the vacuum, he was, in his brown uniform, as nondescript as the other one. She put his age at something between thirty and forty, but his slack skin was already sinking into his cheekbones. He could have been much younger. His features were neutral to the point of blandness: regular, symmetrical, echoes of a dozen different ethnicities easily projected onto his bone structure. She wondered if he’d had himself altered to be ordinary, or if his ability to blend in had led him to a life of theft and rootlessness.

       No way to ask him now.

      He had taken a shot directly in the sternum, and his chest had collapsed with the impact. She wondered if it had been a quick death, if he had blacked out and felt no pain. She hoped not.

      She stepped over him to the other body, sprawled out on the deck, staring sightlessly upward, her unlined face forever stilled. Young. Maybe new. Maybe not even out here a year. This was not what she would have hoped for when she chose her deployment, the ship on which she would live her entire life.

      Beyond her, Elena saw Darrow and the medic crouched before another soldier, slumped against the wall. Elena knelt down with the others. He was a sturdily built man around her own age, breathing but unconscious; the medic was administering something with a dermal patch.

      The man shifted and his eyelids fluttered, and she felt her heart thumping against her chest. She took a quick look at his uniform. “Lieutenant. Can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me.”

      A small sound pushed its way through his lips. If the ship had not been so cavernously silent, she would not have heard him.

      “Come on,” she entreated. Cautiously she extended a hand and touched his arm; he shifted again.

      “… sorry …” he murmured. His eyes opened, staring at nothing.

      “Lieutenant, do you know where you are?”

      “Sydney,” he said. His unfocused gaze had wandered to the dead woman.

      “Is that her name?”

      He swallowed. “Dead now.”

      “I know, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

      He did not respond, just kept his eyes focused over her shoulder. “Sorry,” he said again; and as she watched, his eyes grew damp.

      She rubbed his arm, helpless. “Just hang on. Help is coming.”

      He shook his head. “No help.”

      We came as fast as we could, she thought; but that was her excuse, and it gave him nothing. She kept her hand on his arm, hoping the contact would give him something to focus on, a reason to fight back.

      “Who is it?”

      Greg’s voice in her ear, normal and familiar. The medic responded. “Lieutenant Farias,” he said. “He took plasma fire. I think it was either him or Sydney who took out the raider.”

      “Ask him if the raider was the one in the brig,” Greg said.

      The medic gave Elena a look, but shifted to one side so she could question the injured man. “Lieutenant Farias, were you and Sydney on duty? Was there a raider in your brig?”

      But he had started closing his eyes again, and she could not be sure he had understood her. “No help,” he said again. “I’m sorry, Sydney.” And he fell unconscious once more.

      Elena stood and moved away, letting the medic tend to him. She could not see where he had been shot, and she wondered instead if he had been beaten, if he had taken a blow to the head. “Did you get that?” she asked Greg.

      “Not much to get,” he observed. “Will he live?”

      Elena, who had not had the heart for such bluntness, looked at the medic, who nodded. “Can’t say for sure,” he equivocated aloud. “The concussion is pretty bad, but he’s got no fractures. As long as he doesn’t fall into a coma, he should recover in a few days.”

      “Not sooner?” Greg asked.

      The medic’s lips thinned with disapproval. “You want guarantees, Captain, you won’t get them from me,” he said shortly.

      Greg was silent for a moment. “Chief, on a private line, please.” When she changed over, he said, “Are you okay there?”

      She knew what he meant. “I’m better off here than home chewing on it,” she replied. “I want to get through this debris, and bring home some evidence.”

      It was Greg’s turn to be silent, and she could see his face in her mind, knowing something was going on with her, uncertain of what he should do about it. Kindness. So often kindness from him, these days. She wished she could trust it.

      In the end, he let it go. “All right, Chief,” he told her. “Carry on.”

      She waited until they came to carry the injured lieutenant away, and then she reattached her tether and went back outside alone.

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