Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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СКАЧАТЬ in the fleet, but still recognized earlier than most. Jimmy had acquired his M.D., and was a lieutenant commander on Exeter’s medical team. An average promotion run: not exceptional, but certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

      He’s in charge of Exeter’s medical team now, she thought, remembering the quick look she’d had at the casualty list.

      Jimmy had always handled his drinking impressively well, she recalled; anesthetizing himself at night seemed to leave him fit for duty during the day. She suspected he was close to numb by now. She couldn’t blame him. If she were capable of drinking, she would have taken the same approach. Of course Jimmy always got angry, she recalled, before the anesthetic took proper effect. On this day she was not inclined to blame him. “How are you holding up?” she asked him.

      Jimmy snorted something that sounded like a laugh, and stared into his glass. “Is that a joke?” he asked, tossing back the remains of the drink.

      “No,” she said, “but that sounds like an answer.”

      His eyes shot into hers, angry and resentful. “Still judging, I see.”

      “Come on, Youda,” Dee said.

      “But that was always your thing, wasn’t it?” Jimmy went on, as if Dee had said nothing. “Tell us all what we should feel. How we should handle it. You going to tell me how I should handle this?”

      His rage was palpable, and it felt strangely personal. “I’m not going to tell you anything,” she replied, as gently as she could. Why would she try to tell anyone how to process something like this?

      Jimmy fell silent, mollified, and Dee risked looking away from him. “I heard you got Farias out of the brig alive. Have you talked to him yet?”

      She shook her head. “I just got back.” And she suspected it would be some time before the man would be ready to talk to anyone. Still, while she had Dee’s attention, she risked doing some fishing. “Dee, the way we found him—was there someone in your brig when you were attacked?”

      “Why do you want to know?” Jimmy asked her. His tone was just short of being openly hostile, and she remembered, then, how he had behaved after Canberra, where they had lost only one man. Jimmy’s usual, somewhat forced charm had disintegrated into prickly hostility, the reality of what they had been through removing most of his desire to get along with anyone. Canberra had knocked his legs out from under him; she could only guess what this incident had done.

      She decided to be as honest as she could. “I was wondering about the dead raider I found outside,” she said. “If he was the prisoner. If they might have been trying to break him out.”

      “Did a pretty shitty job of it if they were, didn’t they?”

      Jimmy had always been a good medic, and she had no doubt he was now a good doctor; but when he wasn’t dealing with a patient, he could be tiresomely cynical. “Actually,” she pushed, “it occurred to me they were executing him. It’s possible he got caught in that alcove by accident, but I doubt it.”

      She had expected curiosity at that remark, or even defensiveness. Instead, Dee and Jimmy exchanged a quick glance, and she brought her chin up. “What is it?” she asked.

      Dee said, “Nothing,” just as Jimmy said, “None of your business, Shaw.”

      Shit. Like hell it’s none of my business. “You know something.” Her eyes went to Dee, who was looking away. “Both of you.”

      “We know it was a waste,” Jimmy snapped.

      “Shut up,” Dee hissed at him, and shot her an apologetic glance. “He’s drunk,” he explained.

      “Yeah, but he’s talking to me,” she said, turning back to Jimmy. “What was a waste?”

      “He shouldn’t even have been prosecuted, if you ask me,” Jimmy declared, his thick tongue loosened. “He was following orders. He was a patriot.”

      Elena began to wonder how long he had been drinking. “The raider was a patriot? What are you talking about?”

      Jimmy ignored her interruption. “They hung him out to dry because they didn’t need him anymore, thanks to you. You never could mind your own fucking business, Shaw.”

      “Shut the fuck up, Youda. That’s an order,” Dee snapped.

      “Fuck you, Keita. I’m the fucking chief of medicine now. You have no authority over med.”

      Elena ignored their squabble, her head spinning with blind confusion. “My fault? How could an attack in the Third Sector be my fault?”

      “Youda, goddammit, I swear—”

      “We wouldn’t have been carrying him if you hadn’t made yourself out to be a fucking hero,” Jimmy yelled at Elena, “stopping a fucking war with some backwater pirates at the expense of every other fucking thing that mattered!”

      And it came to her then, with ice-cold certainty, freezing away all of her exhaustion. His court-martial, unlike hers and Greg’s, had been secret, despite the fact that his crime had been far more central to everything that had happened last year; and his punishment had lacked any mercy at all.

      “MacBride. You were carrying Niall MacBride.”

      “Were being the operative word,” Jimmy snarled, raising a mock toast.

      She turned to Dee, dumbfounded. His face was shuttered. “Don’t ask me,” he warned her. “I’m under orders, Songbird, and I outrank you.”

      She felt as if someone had wrapped a fist around her stomach and twisted. Niall MacBride, court-martialed alongside her and Greg, but for vastly different charges: incitement to war. Although, from Jimmy’s response, it seemed rumors of the truth were rampant. MacBride had been found guilty—quietly—and sentenced discreetly. And now, apparently, he had been sprung out of prison, the cost a mere ninety-seven trained Corps soldiers, and one starship.

      “I think,” she told Dee, “we need to talk to Captain Foster.”

       CHAPTER 8

       Orunmila

      All the way back to Orunmila, Guanyin stayed silent, listening to the others talking in subdued voices about what they had seen. She stared out the window as her ship, intact and safe, grew larger in the shuttle’s front window. The last few hours had been a blur of faces, some injured, some panicked, all stunned, as Exeter’s surviving crew members had regrouped and recognized what had happened to their home. To her consternation she found herself cast in the role of savior, and more than once was subjected to a grateful and rather desperate embrace. One man, some years older than she was, had started to weep, and she had held him as gently as she could until Keita’s people brought in a medic. Keita extracted the man from her arms with more compassion than she would have credited him with, and traveled with him back to Galileo with the other wounded.

      She had thought Commander Shaw’s assessment had been premature, but based on what she СКАЧАТЬ