Becalmed (2 page)

What did I do on Ukhanda?

Do I know?

Do they?

“Am I in serious trouble?” I ask.

For a moment, the woman’s eyes
soften. I sense compassion. But then, I might be searching for it.

Or seeing it where it does not
exist.

“Yes,” she says.

“Could it damage my family?” I
ask.

“Yes,” she says.

I have left my family out of this
so far. I haven’t contacted them since my return. Nor have I allowed any of
them to contact me, although they’ve tried. I have shut them out, changed the
contact codes, refused to acknowledge them when they’ve been outside my door.

Now I feel a bit of comfort—what
I had seen as selfish behavior will benefit them after all.

“I’m not going with you until I
have an advocate,” I say.

“Good choice,” she says, and
waits while I contact the best advocate we have.

~ * ~

I
have never met my advocate before, but I have followed her work for nearly a
decade. Legal matters onboard ship are often petty, but they provide real-time
entertainment of a kind that most fictions can’t.

And when the legal matters spill
into the Fleet, then the entertainment ratchets up.

Leona Shearing has handled some
of the biggest intraFleet controversies, but she keeps her hand in on the
smaller cases, mostly, she tells me when she arrives at my apartment, because
she likes to remain busy. IntraFleet controversies happen only rarely. Smaller,
shipboard cases occur every day.

She acts as if I’m a smaller
shipboard case. I don’t disabuse her of this notion, although she is surprised
that three medical personnel have come to take me away, not the usual two.

She is a flamboyant woman who
wears her hair down. She prefers flowing garments, unusual clothing in the
Fleet, where most every department has its own uniform and the uniforms differ
only by color. She does not work for the Fleet. She runs her own business. All
the advocates have their own businesses, as do some of the tutors scattered
across the ships. Specialists on the
Sante
often work privately as well,
and so do many of the restaurateurs on the
Brazza.

Still, working for someone other
than the Fleet is unusual, and risky. Many do not acknowledge their difference,
wearing clothing that suggests a uniform. Leona Shearing accentuates her
difference with her clothing and her hair. Her manner, however, is strictly
professional.

She interviews me briefly—asking my
name, my rank, my position, as if she’s checking to see if I am of sound mind.
Then she turns to the three medical personnel, who have not left the room, and
asks them why they didn’t just send for me.

“She needs to be escorted,” the
woman says.

“You only need two people for
that,” Leona says.

“One stays. We have occasion to
search the apartment.”

She frowns, then narrows her eyes
as she looks at me. “Did you let them in here?”

“No,” I say. “They overrode the
codes.”

She stands. “You need to tell me
what she’s being accused of.”

“She ran a team of twenty-seven
to study the Quurzod,” the woman says. “Only three returned.”

“I assume she’s one of the three
who returned,” Leona says.

“Yes,” the woman says.

“The twenty-four are dead?” Leona
asks.

“We believe so,” the woman says.

“You don’t know?” Leona asks.

“We have not verified the deaths,”
the woman says.

Something whispers across my
brain, too fast for me to catch it.

“Are the other two survivors
being investigated?” Leona says.

“No,” the woman says.

“Why not?” Leona asks.

The woman looks at me. “She’s the
only one who broke away from the group.”

My stomach clenches. I have to
will my hands not to form fists. I lean against the portal, unable to look at
the strangeness of space.

“So?” Leona says.

“So she’s the only one we found
covered in blood,” the woman says.

I bite my lower lip. Technically,
they didn’t find me. Technically, I staggered into a nearby village, and the
villagers contacted the ship.

Technically, I found them.

“I still don’t see the issue,”
Leona asks. “I’m sure you tested the blood. From your tone and her appearance,
I’m gathering that it wasn’t all hers.”

“None of it was hers,” the woman
says.

I glance at Leona. I expect her
to look at me, then get up and nod toward me regretfully, to tell me that I no
longer deserve her services. But she doesn’t look in my direction at all.

Instead, she says to the woman, “Correct
me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we at war with the Quurzod?”

“We weren’t then,” the woman
says.

“We weren’t friendly,” Leona
says. “We were there at the request of the Xenth, to investigate claims of
genocide, were we not?”

The woman stiffens. So do I. I
don’t remember genocide. I don’t remember going planetside.

I don’t remember anything except
the heat, the dry air. The stench of drying blood.

“We weren’t at war yet,” the
woman says primly.

“We were in unfriendly territory,
trying to change the balance of power,” Leona says. “That’s as close as you can
get without declaring hostilities.”

The woman’s mouth thins. The men
haven’t moved. It’s as if the conversation is going on in another room.

I try not to look at them. I try
not to look at any of them.

“I am not a politician,” the
woman says. “I’m not sure at what stage a war becomes a war.”

“Perhaps at the first sign of
bloodshed,” Leona says.

“I think that’s too simplistic,”
the woman says.

“I thought you weren’t a
politician,” Leona says.

They stare at each other. My
heart pounds. I’m not sure what my advocate is playing at.

The woman takes a deep breath. “They
say she caused the deaths.”

“Who says?” Leona asks, and I
hear a new note in her voice. Triumph? Had she been fishing for information?
Was that why she goaded the medics?

“The other two,” the woman says.

“The other two,” Leona says. “Who
weren’t covered in blood.”

“Yes,” the woman says.

“Who didn’t stagger out of the
desert alone, dehydrated, and nearly dead,” Leona says.

Was I nearly dead? I don’t
remember that. I just remember how the heat served up mirages like water, how
the air had so much dust it seemed like a live thing, how my skin burned to the
touch.

“What were they doing while their
colleagues were dying?” Leona says.

The woman gets that prim look
again. “I don’t know,” she says. “You’ll have to ask them.”

She’s lying. She knows.

My stomach is a hard knot. I rest
one hand against it, hoping to soothe it.

“If you suspect her of a heinous
crime,” Leona says, “why did you let her back on ship?”

“She has the captain’s
protection,” the woman says.

I wince. I didn’t ask for that.
He shouldn’t be involved.

“The captain can’t protect her,”
Leona says. “He should know that. If she’s done something wrong, she gets
punished— planetside.”

“We’re at war,” the woman says. “We
couldn’t keep our people planetside.”

“Then we leave her and bring the
innocents back,” Leona says.

I close my eyes. She’s right.
That’s what the regulations say. I shouldn’t be here.

“The captain can’t change the
regulations,” Leona says. She’s clearly pushing something, but what I don’t
know.

“Actually,” the woman says, “that’s
a gray area. We have two policies, the modern and the ancient. Both apply in
this case.”

Leona frowns. She doesn’t agree.
Isn’t it her business to know the regulations? Isn’t she the expert in them,
like I’m the expert in languages?

“No one gets left behind,” the
woman says. “That’s the ancient regulation. No matter how criminal, how
perverted, how sick, no one gets left behind.”

She looks at me as she says those
things and she has that look in her eyes again. What I had initially taken for
sympathy is something else. Fear? Disgust?

“The captain chose to follow that
regulation,” the woman says.

“Is that why he didn’t run the
announcement?” I ask.

“I don’t presume to know why the
captain does what he does,” the woman says. “He should have left you behind.”

“I know,” I say.

Leona frowns at me and even
though I don’t know her, I can read her expression.
Shut up. Let me talk. I’m
your advocate. Let me advocate.

“You want to tell me why he didn’t?”
the woman asks.

I shrug one shoulder. I don’t
honestly know. I haven’t talked to him. Since I got back, the entire Fleet’s
been attacked. We’ve moved, been hit, then moved to foldspace. I suspect the
captain’s been busy.

“Are you sure it was him who
ordered me back?” I ask.

“Enough,” Leona says. “We can
talk all night, but until we have facts, I can’t help you. And I need to know
what you want. I know what they want. They want to test you.”

She’s looking at me, and her eyes
hold no emotion at all. Only a few people can effectively do that. She’s
clearly learned it over the course of her career. She doesn’t know what to
think of me, and she doesn’t want me to know that.

She wants me to think she’s on my
side.

As if I know what my side is.

“I can block the tests,” she
says.

My heart leaps as she says this,
but I dry swallow yet again. I am afraid of the tests. I am afraid of what they
will reveal. I am afraid of what they won’t reveal.

“Why don’t you study my case,” I
say, sounding calm and logical, which I am not, “and then we’ll decide what to
do.”

“We need to take her out of the
residential wing,” the woman says. “She’s dangerous.”

“We don’t know that,” Leona says.

“We can assume,” the woman says.

Leona turns back to her. Leona’s
expression changes, from that flat look she gives me to something akin to
anger. Only I’m not sure that emotion is real either.

“From my understanding,” Leona
says, “she’s been here for days. If she was going to snap, she would have
already. Lock the doors, post a guard, put some kind of monitor on her. But
leave her here. You know as well as I do that familiarity provides comfort.”