Chimeras star, p.16
Chimera's Star, page 16
“No harm, no foul, in a lot of ways.”
“Except that a Senior CPO cold-cocked her department head,” Roslyn murmured. “So, how is Chief Vasiliauskas?”
“That is a lot harder to judge,” the doctor admitted. “By the time the Marines got her here, she’d collapsed. No need for sedatives or restraints, but she’s still in a secured room with another guard.”
Roslyn glanced around and realized she couldn’t even see the guard. McConnell clearly followed her look and smiled sadly.
“Our secured cubicles are intentionally positioned to be invisible from the entrance, Skipper,” she observed. “Otherwise, people walk in, see a Marine, and get worried for some reason.”
“Fair. So, what happens now?” Roslyn asked.
McConnell checked something on her desk.
“Vasiliauskas is asleep at the moment. She didn’t move after we put her in the room, but she was still awake for two hours. I hesitate to let anyone wake her up,” the doctor said warningly. “My guess is that we’re looking at a psychiatric incident, which means I have an obligation to dig in to what and why and how before I make any recommendation at all.”
“She punched a superior officer,” Roslyn murmured. “Hard to make that disappear.”
“I can sure as hell make sure it doesn’t go in front of a Mast, though,” McConnell replied. “Yang’s Sergeant-at-Arms has interviewed everyone who was in the room already and, I suspect, made blood-curdling threats to slow the rumor spread.
“I need to review those interviews and talk to Vasiliauskas myself when she wakes up. Everything I have seen so far suggests rapid-onset situational trauma.”
“There’s nothing new in this star system to cause that,” Roslyn noted. “The system itself is a shock to the psyche, but we’ve been watching that on everyone.”
The Royal Martian Navy did not really expect to end up orbiting dead worlds seared by antimatter fire. They’d managed to keep their wars away from that level of massacre.
Whoever had owned this system hadn’t, which made just being there hard on the crew.
“I don’t know what she was working on,” McConnell agreed. “That’s why I need to review those interviews and talk to her. What I can tell you is that she was not in her right mind when she was brought in.
“That’s enough, in my mind, to activate the initial phases of Article Nine.”
Article Nine of the Navy Foundation Act, the fundamental law and code of the RMN, covered the responsibilities of the Royal Martian Navy with regards to its injured personnel. Including mental, moral and emotional injuries.
“It’s your call,” Roslyn agreed. “My job—and Chief Kovalyow’s job, for that matter—is to make certain this ship is a functioning warship of Her Majesty’s Navy. That may well never include returning Chief Vasiliauskas to duty.”
“Of course.” McConnell shrugged. “The most likely scenario I see, sir, is a medical leave of absence that sees her restricted to sickbay and her quarters until we can return to base and hand her over to a more-complete medical facility.
“That may or may not follow up with a full Article Nine discharge.”
“Which will be a hell of a day for all of us,” Roslyn said. “Her seniority transferred, but she’s been an RMN noncom for less than a month.”
“I…” McConnell considered her words. “I have the suspicion, sir, that it didn’t matter who the senior noncom running analysis in tactical last night was. Nothing in Senior Chief Vasiliauskas’s medical records makes me think that she was more vulnerable to this than anyone else. If the senior had been a long-service RMN NCO, I think the odds are something similar might have happened.”
“And that, Anabella, is why I want to know what the hell happened.”
The doctor sighed, glancing behind her as four uniformed nurses emerged from the room they’d been closeted in.
“You can talk to Leavitt, if you want,” she allowed. “No one is talking to Vasiliauskas until she wakes up on her own. I would strongly prefer to interview her before anyone, officially the Captain or not, talks to her.”
“We’ll see,” Roslyn said noncommittally. “That depends on what Vladislav says. Article Nine gives you and me a great deal of authority to make things… go away, let’s say. But Leavitt can make that a giant pain in the ass.”
“That would require an extraordinary action on your part, sir,” McConnell warned.
“We do not know what happened in Chief Vasiliauskas’s mind,” Roslyn said. “But I am prepared to consider that as an option, if I believe that it will be in the best interests of the ship.”
McConnell nodded. The doctor understood. Both Roslyn and Dr. McConnell would have to sign off on returning the Chief to duty. It was McConnell’s job to think about the best case for Chief Vasiliauskas.
And despite her best intentions, what was best for the Chief was at most third on Roslyn’s list of priorities.
20
Leavitt was sitting up when Roslyn stepped into his cubicle, leaning back against the wall and regarding the door with a baleful glare that she suspected worked wonders when he was pretending to be a tyrant to his staff.
The visible bruise on his forehead didn’t hurt the intimidation factor, she judged, but Roslyn had been glared at by the Lord Protector of the Republic of Faith and Reason. And while that man had preferred to give off an air of bemused befuddlement, he’d also had a glare to make ice shiver.
“Captain,” he greeted her. “I take it you’re not here to inform me I’m being released.”
“Not yet, Commander. May I sit?”
“It’s your ship.”
“It’s your sickbay room,” Roslyn said. “I don’t want to put too much pressure on you.”
Leavitt half-chuckled, half-groaned.
“As I have assured Dr. McConnell and her all-too-attentive nurses, I am fine,” he told her.
“You don’t look fine, Lieutenant Commander,” she pointed out.
He poked at the bruise with two fingers and winced.
“Fair; I’ll have to adjust my hair to hide this,” he said calmly. “Can’t quite grow the beard up to cover it, can I?”
“Not really,” Roslyn agreed. “But you’re okay?”
“I don’t like to think of myself as a one-punch man, but other than my pride, I’m pretty sure I’m okay,” Leavitt told her. “How’s the Chief?”
His tone was fascinating to her. It was a practiced thing, a cadence and pitch that managed to both suggest that he didn’t care and yet very clearly communicated that his words were sincere and heartfelt.
“Which one?”
“Vasiliauskas, of course,” he said. “The doctor has been very… circumspect about what she’ll tell me. It’s almost enough to make a man worry about someone who punched him!”
“Reading between the lines of Dr. McConnell’s… circumspection, she was basically catatonic by the time the Marines brought her in, and is currently asleep,” Roslyn said slowly. “You seem less worried about being punched than I expected.”
There was a long silence and Leavitt seemed to look right through her.
“I… am not certain what Chief Vasiliauskas saw,” he finally said. “I know what she was looking at, though, and some of the numbers…”
“Commander?” Roslyn prodded in the silence.
“To be perfectly honest, Captain, my emotional brain is doing some rather spectacular shying away from the conclusions logic says I should draw,” Leavitt admitted. “I…”
This time, she waited him out. It was a good minute before he looked down at his hands, and he hadn’t seen her for any of that time.
“My assessment was that we were looking at a frontier fleet base,” he said quietly. “Chief Vasiliauskas was tasked with scanning the surrounding area for the systems said fleet base was positioned to cover.
“I didn’t see the final conclusions of her analysis pass on our sensor data before she deleted them. But I know one thing: there are no fucking inhabited planets around here. Not enough to justify a fleet base capable of hosting dozens of warships.
“So, either this fleet base was dozens of light-years from any system it was supposed to protect—which raises questions I don’t like—or something happened to those worlds.”
He fell silent again, staring down at his hands. Like Roslyn, Leavitt had learned the mask of command. Unlike Roslyn, it was not yet a permanent part of his exterior, forged by the fire of battle.
There, in a quiet sickbay room with just his Captain, it was fragmenting into pieces.
“You think she learned what happened,” Roslyn murmured.
“Or enough to guess.” He finally looked up at her. “And I, being an idiot who pretends not to care, made a stupid fucking joke about her having lost a few dozen alien colonies.”
Roslyn nodded slowly.
“I need to talk to Vasiliauskas,” she told him. “Dr. McConnell has already activated Article Nine protections around the Chief, but we both know that you can make that damn difficult on us.”
Psych assessment or not, it was still within Lieutenant Commander Leavitt’s purview to press charges. That would leave Roslyn in the unfortunate situation of deciding what was better for the ship: to hold a formal Captain’s Mast and have the Article Nine shield put fully on the record, or to informally step on one of her key officers.
“I… I think I also need to talk to the Chief,” Leavitt said softly. “And it might be the head injury talking, but at this moment, I am inclined to say I don’t remember enough to press charges.”
“She’s awake.”
“I need to talk to her,” Roslyn told McConnell. “I am fine with you being in the room and continuing your interview, Doctor, but I have to talk to Chief Vasiliauskas right now.”
The doctor looked like she was going to argue for a few seconds, but Roslyn simply met her gaze and waited. McConnell could fight her on this, but Roslyn would win.
Not because the doctor didn’t have the authority to override her—McConnell most definitely did—but because Roslyn would only make the demand she was making if it was critical to the ship and the mission.
McConnell might not know Roslyn well enough to trust that yet. But the doctor was going to have to trust her, sooner or later.
There was no better time to start than the present.
“We’ll talk to her together, and if I kick you out, you stay kicked out, that clear, sir?”
“As crystal, Doctor. Let’s go.”
McConnell still looked hesitant for a moment, then sighed and nodded. Gesturing for Roslyn to follow her, she led the way into the back of the sickbay, turning around a corner that the angles helped conceal from the door.
Around that corner, a pair of Marines in light body armor equipped with SmartDart stunguns waited. They flanked a door that looked the same as the other cubicle entryways except for a telltale thicker framing.
“The Captain and I will speak to the Chief,” McConnell told the Marines. It wasn’t a request. “No one else goes in or out.”
“Yes, sir.”
The senior Marine tapped his wrist-comp against the door frame. There was a barely audible sequence of clicks as several locks released, and the other Marine pushed the door open.
While practice and training meant that one of them was always a step away from the door, with hands clear for a weapon, Roslyn could see the slight difference between them expecting an escape attempt versus, well, expecting Chief Vasiliauskas to cooperate.
If only because she’d been on the other side of a cell door once. And while she’d never say so to any Marine, it had been very clear where the Republic Space Assault Force had taken their doctrine from.
“Chief, the Captain and I are coming in,” McConnell warned Vasiliauskas. She didn’t wait for a response, stepping through the door the Marine had opened and entering the small room.
The space, thankfully, was intended to be large enough for emergency surgery. There was enough space for McConnell to have two chairs positioned by the bed before Roslyn joined her.
“I’m surprised you don’t have me restrained,” the Chief said quietly, the soft accent of a native Hindi speaker blurring her words slightly.
“That depends, I suppose,” Roslyn told Vasiliauskas. “Do you think that’s necessary?”
“No.”
“Do you remember what happened?” McConnell asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence, and Vasiliauskas stared at the ceiling.
“I feel like I should be asking for a lawyer,” she finally said.
“That’s an option,” Roslyn told her. “We have a legal department under Lieutenant Todorov. I can have counsel here in about ten minutes.”
She hadn’t thought of that, and she should have.
“Right now, though, this isn’t a Captain’s Mast and everything you say in this room will be covered under patient-doctor confidentiality.”
“With the Captain in the room?” Vasiliauskas asked drily.
“I am here, Chief, because you deleted information from our scan analysis that I am afraid I need to know,” Roslyn told her. “The aftermath of that… There are enough questions in there to keep you and Dr. McConnell busy sorting out whether or not you do need a lawyer.
“But for the ship and the mission, I need to know what you deleted. And why.”
The Chief turned away from them, looking blankly at the far wall.
“There was no why,” she whispered. “Didn’t think. Couldn’t… couldn’t… It can’t be right. But… all those systems. All those radiation signs.”
“Chief,” Roslyn said gently. “I have to know. We’re already working on reconstructing what you saw. But if you tell me what you saw…”
“Death.”
The single word hung in the sickbay room.
“Okay. That’s… ominous,” Roslyn said with a forced chuckle. “But—”
“Does genocide sound better?” Vasiliauskas demanded. “The killing of worlds and the death of a civilization. No living worlds, only corpses. No planets, only debris and the radiation of antimatter fire.”
Each word was a tombstone, and Roslyn understood how poorly the joke of lost a few dozen alien worlds, have you? had landed.
“That’s…” She swallowed, corralling words like panicked horses. “That’s what I needed to know, Chief.”
“Commander Leavitt is… okay?” Vasiliauskas asked quietly.
“His pride is more bruised than his skull,” Roslyn reassured her. “There will be some unfun conversations, Chief. Next time you and I talk, I will make sure we have a legal officer present.”
She rose.
“For now, I leave you with Dr. McConnell.”
Roslyn needed to go find the people reconstructing the data. They’d already lost time they couldn’t afford… and, hopefully, forewarning of what they might find would prove a shield against shock and trauma for the next team of her people who discovered they’d walked into the valley of death.
21
“So.” Kay looked around his leadership council and smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression, and it was one every person there had seen before.
“According to the Chimerans, the Reezh Ida is and never has been a threat to the Protectorate,” he told them. “According to them, the Ida never had anything like the Prometheus Interface, never even investigated human space and were only a danger to themselves.”
He looked around his people, his smile never wavering.
“In the Burning, as they call it, they know of over forty worlds that the Reezh destroyed,” he continued. “Forty worlds. They didn’t have population numbers that they were willing to share, but estimates we were able to track from the system datanet and similar… put it somewhere in the region of sixty billion sentient beings.
“This is the empire the locals want us to believe is no longer a threat,” Kay said. “I… can do no such thing.”
“So, what are you thinking?” Chaudhary asked. “They’ve seemed welcoming enough, thinking that we’re from the Protectorate, but if they haven’t told us the truth…”
“We know they haven’t,” Koskinen growled. “I haven’t been down there with you and the boss, but I’ve read your summaries. There’s a lot of gaps, a lot of missing pieces.”
“More than anything else, we know there were reezh on Mars,” Kay reminded everyone. “We know the Prometheus Interface was based on alien schematics and could not have worked for humans without Dr. Finley’s modifications.
“It took one of the most powerful Mages of our generation, with a gift for magic unmatched outside the Royal Family itself, to forge that alien technology into a weapon the Republic could use. We allowed that to happen because we needed the warning to our people.”
If there was a piece of any of this mess that Kay actually felt guilty for, it was enabling Finley to do that. He’d worked with the man and his child… but he’d be damned if he didn’t think working with Samuel Finley had been Winton’s greatest mistake.
“So, we know they’re lying to us,” Tomas agreed. “So… what do we do?”
“We find the truth,” Kay snapped. “O’Shea?”
The engineer gave him a calm nod and opened a holographic projection of the dome at the heart of Twin Sphinx.
“Thanks to our discussions with the locals, we know that the ‘hill’ at the center of their capital is actually a giant radiation-containment dome,” O’Shea told the others. “Seven layers deep and extremely effective; they still appear to trust the containment more than I would.”
“On the other hand, they didn’t put the capital there until after the Equality Foundation arrived,” Kay pointed out. “It was a useful landmark close to where the Foundation landed and where the one still-high-tech city the reezh had was.
“Assuming they’re telling the truth about all of that, at least, it lines up with the story they told about the Last Ship.”
“The Last Ship?” Tomas asked, the Mage sounding out the clear capitals.
