Virtues of War (37 page)

“I’m going to keep my team occupied and out of harm’s way,” he replied. “With a message sent to Squadron Command, I’ll await further instructions from an authorized source.”

“Are you kidding?” She stared at him with a mixture of anger and contempt. “You’re just going to let them get away with murder? After what happened to you during the war?”

“What did you just say?” His mental walls buckled dangerously.

“Oh, come on, Jack!” She gestured angrily. “It was all over the news for days. I know what happened to you in Sirius. We all do! We saw the footage of your team being attacked, just like everyone else in Terra.” She seemed to lose some of her rage. “I know what happened to you.”

The images flooded his mind. The crazy speech by that Sirian terrorist leader. The gunfire past Jack’s head, that killed the crewmen behind him. His friend Carmen being beaten to a pulp. And then the white-hot pain as his body was broken.

The darkness. And every night since then, the nightmares.

Every muscle tensed as he stepped forward again.

“You don’t know anything about what happened to me,” he said through clenched teeth. “You don’t fucking know
anything
.”

All of Terra had seen him being beaten by the Sirians. The full realization suddenly struck him. Billions had watched, over and over, the destruction of his body. No wonder so many people stared at him, he realized. It wasn’t because his face was still broken. It was because they’d
watched
it being broken. He was entertainment, a minor distraction for people in their oh-so-busy little lives.

Amanda was glaring at him.

“I know you’re just as crazy as the rest of the combat fleet,” she growled. “Go follow your orders, soldier boy, but I’m getting off this tub and going for help.”

Jack was in no mood to argue, and damned if he was going to carry Amanda through it. Let her learn for herself.

“Who do you think’s going to help?”

That stopped her for a moment.

“The police.”

“They have no jurisdiction.”

“The military police.”

“They’re bound by the Fleet Marshall, just like the rest of us.”

“Admiral Bush, then,” she said, grasping. “When he finds out his precious Helena’s been arrested…” Then Amanda’s own quick thinking brought her to the only possible conclusion. He arrived there at the same time.

“Helena’s been charged with improper relations,” he hissed. “With a superior. Who do you think that is? And who put Breeze in command? Bush is saving his own skin.”

She went silent. Wrapped her arms around herself and leaned back against the bulkhead. After a moment she spoke.

“Then he’s the only smart person on board.” She looked up at him, fear in her eyes. “This is insane.”

It was his turn to be silent. He was still struggling to fight down the memories, still imagining all of Terra watching in their living rooms. He could feel the blood pumping in his temples. His fists clenched at his sides. He felt the rage well up within him—rage at all the worlds.

Those fucking people just sat and watched, as he was nearly beaten to death. Those fucking people were more interested in winning their fucking science awards than building a weapon that could protect soldiers like him. Those fucking people didn’t care one bit about him. About
anything
.

But Katja cared.

And Thomas.

And even Breeze. All three of them had been on
Rapier
when the rescue came. All three of them had risked their lives for him, even though they’d barely known him. They mattered. Fucking assholes like Amanda Smith did not.

“Welcome to military life, Sublieutenant Smith,” he said flatly. “Either you’re with me, or you’re against me—you decide. But I’m not waiting around.”

He turned and marched off, headed for the CO’s cabin.

Somebody had to make sure the download was successful.

* * *

It took hours to collect together everything that
Armstrong
had gathered and analyzed over the past few months. The process was made more difficult by the fact that most of the Dark Bomb research was scattered among the many special experiments that Lincoln had always been demanding.

It was a mess. Jack was glad he was only a subbie, and not responsible for the failure of the science team.

Breeze returned to the ship that afternoon and collected the data crystals. The new, fourth bar on her shoulders quelled any protests when she ordered the company confined to the ship, then went ashore. In Jack’s experience, when officers reached the rank of captain, they could pretty much break whatever rule they wanted.

He wandered the decks for a while, recognizing the state of shock in which the
Armstrong
’s crew found themselves. These people weren’t soldiers, he reminded himself. Even the crew members from engineering had mostly spent their careers in the Research Squadron. No one else on board had been deployed to the recent troubles.

Jack tried to join in a few passageway conversations that he happened upon, but no one seemed interested in hearing the opinion of a combat veteran. They were all convinced they knew best, and in this shocked state only like-minded opinions were welcome.

He didn’t want to risk running into Amanda in the wardroom, and he just got cagey in his tiny cabin, so eventually he found himself back in the lab. It was deserted, workstations still active where people had abandoned them after the incident. The smell lingered despite the ship’s ventilation system. Lacking any greater inspiration, he grabbed the cleaning gear and started working on what remained of the mess.

It was surprisingly soothing, so long as he didn’t think about what he was cleaning up, and he felt his spirit lighten as the deck began to shine again. At the Astral College he’d always volunteered for the floors during pre-inspection work. It was simple work—just apply, rub, and repeat—and the sheer banality of it had often helped him work through problems his coursework presented.

Cleaning hadn’t helped him master the math portion of his degree, but the philosophical insights he’d gained with a brush in hand had impressed many a professor. He sighed to himself. Maybe he should have been
Armstrong
’s janitor, not her pilot. The delays in the Dark Bomb research weren’t just Lincoln’s fault, he knew. If he hadn’t overreacted when that ship had buzzed them during that first major field expedition…

He dropped his brush, straightening on his knees.

Where had that ship come from? In all the chaos and shouting that had followed his little maneuver, he’d spent all his energies trying to reschedule the experiments and he’d never followed up. But the question remained.

Rising to his feet, he crossed to a workstation.

All the official research had been locked down, but what he was looking for hadn’t been included, since the experiment had been aborted. Even so, the instruments had been recording for the hours leading up to the close encounter, and that data had never been erased. So he started the playback right from the beginning.

The 4-D picture that came up in front of him was remarkably interesting in its mundanity. That particular region had been selected specifically because of its lack of spacetime anomalies, and the gentle curvature was virtually featureless. Yet the instruments they had employed were extremely sensitive, and as Jack watched he saw the readings blur from time to time as he maneuvered the Hawk.

The hunt controls to which he was accustomed were far more robust, and designed for high acceleration, but he had to admit that when the platform was stationary, these instruments provided an outstanding spacetime picture.

Tapping into the Hawk’s flight logs, he quickly pinpointed the first moment when his brane sensors had detected the incoming ship. Because they’d been on their lowest power setting, the intruder had been inside of a thousand kilometers before being detected. With a bit of puzzling, he managed to cross-reference the Hawk’s radar image with the spacetime instruments it had carried.

Sure enough, when he zoomed in he saw the tiny ripple in spacetime that revealed the gravimetric signature of the other ship. He was impressed, too—his hunt controls would never have picked up so small an object, moving at such slow speeds.

Having identified the ship in spacetime, Jack began to play the recording in reverse. The intruder maintained a steady course and speed for over an hour, and then it disappeared.

More accurately, he realized, it had been closing on his Hawk for more than an hour before the near miss. That made him frown. Where had it been before then? Had it been stationary? Velocity increased mass, so a stationary object would be harder to detect, but as slow as the ship had been moving, it really shouldn’t have made a difference. He began to scan the data for any other evidence of where it might have been.

There was a sound. The lab door opened. He looked up.

Amanda peered in. Her cynical confidence was gone, replaced by a pale trepidation that only increased when her sweeping gaze landed on Jack. She stared at him silently.

He stared back, not knowing what to say.

She stood motionless for a long time, watching him. Then finally she stepped through into the lab. She looked around at the half-clean floor.

“Did you do this?”

He noticed where he’d dropped his brush. “I figured it had to be done, but then I got busy working on something else.”

She moved toward him, studiously avoiding the center of the room.

“What are you working on?”

It was too hard to hold her gaze, and he dropped his eyes back to his screen. “Nothing important. Just pilot stuff.”

He heard a scrape as she dragged a chair over to sit next to him, felt her warm hand on his shoulder. “Jack…”

He ran a hand across his face. He wanted to stay angry, but he just didn’t have the will.

“You don’t understand.”

“I know.” She pulled closer, her hand reaching to the back of his neck. “I am so sorry for what happened to you. And for what I said earlier.”

He thought about Katja, and how she’d used her anger to stay strong. But he knew it just wasn’t in him to be the same. Who was he kidding—he’d never be a real soldier, like her or Thomas. He turned toward Amanda, trying to put a reassuring hand on her waist.

She didn’t drop her arm, and his movement turned into a hug as she pulled him closer. He found himself wrapping his arms around her soft, warm body, burying his face against her shoulder. She held him tight.

He hung on for dear life.

“I’m not the same guy who left Earth nine months ago,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

“I never met that other guy,” she said, “but I sure like you.”

He laughed slightly. “Is that why you pull my hair and call me names?”

She turned her head, nuzzling her face next to his. “No. I do that because you’re a jerk.”

He snickered, the shudder rolling into a giggle that he struggled to stop. He pressed closer against her, trying to muffle the laughter that was bubbling up from within. It was crazy, but suddenly everything just seemed better.

“So,” she said, “I need to think about something fresh. Do you want to tell me about this ‘pilot stuff’ you’re working on?”

He pulled back from the embrace, but moved her arms to wrap over his shoulders as he sat up to the workstation again. She stood close behind him and listened as he outlined what he’d found so far in his search for that mystery ship.

“Why are you only using gravimetric sensors?” she asked when he reached his current dead end.

“What else would I use?”

She leaned against him as she reached forward to manipulate the controls. He’d never realized how good she felt up close. At her command, another set of readings appeared graphically on the screen.

“Well,” she said, “for starters, here’s what was happening to the dark-energy levels.” Pausing, she looked closer. “Hmm, that’s interesting.”

“What?”

She pointed at a bright patch on the screen, quite close to where the ship had appeared. “That’s an anomaly I noticed in the field data from the second run we did a few weeks later. But there were
two
anomalies in our official data. Here there’s just one.”

“What kind of anomaly is it?”

“Don’t know. It’s a concentration of dark energy on the brane. At the time I figured it was just a Kearns vortex, but it doesn’t seem to be causing any unusual expansion of spacetime. The second one didn’t either, even though its make-up was quite different. They were odd, but I never had time to look at them more closely.”

“I suppose the other one is locked up with the rest of the official Dark Bomb data?” he suggested.

“Yeah.” She looked around thoughtfully, and her face lit up. “But I never did get around to recycling those broken probes we cleaned up.” She walked over to the far bulkhead and fished through the various pieces of blackened equipment, returning eventually with a handful of data drives. “It’ll be on one of these.”

A few minutes of searching revealed the readings from the second—and successful—experiment in the same region. Sure enough, a second dark-energy concentration appeared on the screen, sitting virtually on top of the older one. Both patches were bright, but the original one was diffuse and ragged, while the newcomer was very small and precise.

Jack did an analysis of the first one. The pattern was familiar.

“That looks like a jump gate, although not a stable one.”

“There aren’t any jump gates around there, Jack.”

He turned to look up at her. “You’d be surprised where jump gates have shown up recently.” Their faces were just inches apart.

She made to protest, but checked herself. “That would explain why the ship just came out of nowhere.” She nodded.

“Yeah, but then why would a second object appear?” He pointed to the screen.

She leaned in again and opened a secondary display. “Let’s do a search of known objects in the database.”

Even as she started the search, he knew it would turn up empty. Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t going to be recorded in the usual archives. He almost wanted to start cleaning the deck again, to find his thinking groove, but Amanda’s presence around his shoulders was too nice to disturb.