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.”
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 had overheard, the crew fully expected that Exeter was going to be scrapped. Another incomprehensible Central custom. Apart from the destroyed engine room, the ship had sustained very little damage. Guanyin thought her own people could have repaired it within two months, given the parts. But there was more to it than that, she learned as she absorbed snatches of conversation: it seemed Central was inclined to quietly retire ships that had suffered such devastating damage. Instead of harvesting older ships to repair Exeter, Exeter herself would be parted out and recycled; and Captain Çelik, regardless of how well he recovered, would likely be shuffled off to some sort of bureaucratic position.
And that, she thought, as Cali maneuvered the shuttle into Orunmila’s fore hangar, would be the end of him.
She unclipped her harness and rose absently to her feet, hanging on to the hand grip toward the ceiling. It was none of her business how they dealt with their officers. After ten years as second-in-command and six months as captain, she should have learned how to let go of anger over things she could not change. At least this time she could funnel it into something useful.
Yunru was waiting for her on the tarmac, his arms full of their two-year-old daughter. Lin’s dark head lay against his shoulder, her round arms locked around his neck. Even from a distance Guanyin could see the child frowning. She quickened her step, leaving Cali behind.
“What is it, my little gumdrop?” she asked as she approached.
Lin turned and held out her arms, her face dissolving. Guanyin met Yunru’s eyes as she relieved him of his burden, bouncing Lin gently and rubbing her back as she snuffled noisily into Guanyin’s neck.
“She wanted to wait up for you,” he said. “I told her no. She has been objecting for the last three hours.”
Overtired and unhappy, just like Mama, Guanyin thought. “Lin, my love, I miss you, too. But you must sleep, dear. And you must listen to what your father tells you.”
Still carrying Lin, she fell into step with Yunru. “I’ll hang on to her if you like,” she said. “You get some sleep.”
He gave her a curious look. “You look like you need it more than I do.”
“I may,” she conceded, “but I’m too furious at the moment to close my eyes. And I have to make a comm.”
There was a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Don’t curse in front of her, okay? She’s too good a mimic.”
“It won’t matter,” she said, giving him a smile. “I’ll be speaking Standard.”
He leaned over to rub Lin briefly on the back. Lin made an angry sound of objection, and nestled herself more firmly against Guanyin’s neck. Guanyin would have chided her, but Yunru just smiled and headed back to the suite they shared with the children.
By the time Guanyin reached her office Lin had stopped crying, and grown drowsy against Guanyin’s shoulder. She shifted the little girl as she sat, and took a few minutes to whisper to her gently until she fell asleep. It was a bad habit to instill, she knew, letting the child doze off in her arms; but soon enough Lin would be too old for it. Cali always told her she was worse with the children than she was with Samedi. Which was, Guanyin reflected, perfectly true, and one maternal luxury she never intended to give up.
When she placed the comm to Galileo, she kept the vid turned off.
They had an officer filtering all incoming messages. He sounded young, and appropriately intimidated when she identified herself, and she felt a little better. By the time Captain Foster came on the line, she had resurrected all of her outrage.
“Captain Shiang,” he began, in that measured, polite tone of his, “on behalf of Central, I wanted to thank you for coming to Exeter’s aid. She would not have survived without your assistance.”
Chanyu had spent a lot of time teaching her manners. She had never much cared for them.
“From what I have heard said,” she told him, “Exeter did not, in fact, survive. Is my understanding correct?”
A pause on the line. “Yes,” he said, and she was surprised at his candor. “But that doesn’t change the fact that three hundred people are alive now who would not have been if they’d had to wait for us.”
“PSI are not so cynical as you are, Captain Foster.” Her rage felt cold; she wanted him to feel cold as well. “We do not let any ship fight off such an attack alone when we are able to help. We would even help Galileo, if it came to that. But now that the crisis is finished, we must leave you.”
“Captain Shiang,” he said, “if this is because of our earlier exchange—”
“It is not.” Full points, though, she had to admit, for his being willing to shoulder the blame. She had read that he was an honorable man. It was the only consistent thing in all of the reports of him she had found. “Captain Foster, do you know how many people I have on my ship?”
“Eight hundred,” he replied. He sounded resigned, and she wondered if he already knew what she was going to say.
“And are you aware that it is my personal responsibility to look after each one of those people?”
“I believe our respective services view the role similarly, Captain.”
Do not try to ally yourself with me. “I will help any ship in distress, Captain, but I will not give assistance to an organization that has chosen to use subterfuge to obtain our trust, that has deliberately concealed intelligence, and that allowed us to enter a volatile situation