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.
Ted,” Jessica asked, “are you afraid of the dark?”
She was kneeling on the floor, running her magnetic scanner over Exeter’s data core, looking for echoes of information. The explosion that had taken out three levels and the entire engine room had sent a shock of heat and current through the system that had effectively shut it down, leaving nothing but the ship’s autonomic functions in place. There was no dynamic data scanning, no seeking, no sorting; she had to read the raw data off the core and feed it to Galileo for analysis. Next to her, Emily Broadmoor, her old boss and a damn good hacker in her own right, had nearly finished patching through the base comm system, so at least Exeter’s internal messaging system would work, after a fashion. With the ship’s brain offline, though, routing would be crude, there would be no records of anything, and the crew would have to route through Galileo for any kind of external services. Stone Age tech.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Ted’s voice said in her ear.
She was transferring the echoes to Ted on Galileo, who was matching them up with Exeter’s last known data dump. With some luck, he would be able to help her pinpoint the weapons data, to see if there had been a malfunction. Greg had been talking about it as a given, but it would be a double-edged sword if she found something. Evidence of malfunction would exonerate deceased gunners; but it would open up an avenue none of them wanted to have to explore.
“That’s bullshit,” she retorted. She frowned at her scanner and slowed it down; the information was patchy here, and she did not want to miss any. God, this job is going to take days. “You’re afraid of the captain.”
“A healthy respect for authority isn’t fear. That bit there, Jess—stop for a second.”
She sat while he waited for Galileo to chew on the data. “I was always afraid of the dark,” she confessed.
“You picked the wrong career,” he said. “Okay, keep going.”
“What was that?”
“Battery information, about three days old. We’re getting closer.”
Gently she nudged the scanner forward. “We’d get these long winter nights at home,” she went on. “Dark twice as long as it was light. When I was little, I figured if someone got sick in the daytime, they might live; but if they got sick at night, they’d never recover.”
“Have you ever considered therapy, Jess?”
“If you looked at the statistics,” she reasoned, “more people got sick at night just because the nights were longer, so more of them died. The correlation was meaningless, of course; but I was a kid.”
He paused, catching on. “You still superstitious?”
“I want,” she told him, carefully teasing apart a particularly dense chunk of information, “to be back home in my room with the lights on, getting very drunk with someone lovely and very, very alive.” She sat back, rubbing her eyes. “You should see this place, Ted. It’s a crypt.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Nearly a hundred dead, at least. How else can you look at it?”
“Like the ones who survived were pretty damn lucky. What do you think would have happened if that PSI