The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (23 page)

              “If the pirate attack failed, you would have to get your hands dirty. I’ll assume they gave you a means of injecting Evelyn when she was still in the stasis tube. When we woke her, you had to find another way to get the liquid into her system. At some point, Evelyn came by the mess hall for a bottle of water, and you gave her one that you had already tampered with. I would imagine you were frustrated when that didn’t work. It was just luck that she didn’t drink that water. You did, however, succeed in killing the plant that Bethany had given our guest.” Piotr’s head seemed to sink lower when he heard this. “When a few days passed and she didn’t turn stupid, as you say, you realized that you’d have to take the direct approach. We’re less than a week out from Cronos and time is short, so you planned to stun her and pour the vial down her throat. Except that Evelyn took the dead plant to Bethany, who brought it to me. It didn’t take us that long to figure out where the water had come from and who had given it to her. Of course, we couldn’t be sure, so we moved Evelyn to another room and had Mr. Jang wait for whoever came knocking.

              “I didn’t want it to be you. I really didn’t, Piotr.” She shook her head, her feelings mixed. “You know, we’ve known there was a traitor on board for a while. I really thought for a while that it might have been Yegor, and that he had been attempting to join the pirate crew rather than fight them off. But no, he just died trying to defend this ship from attack, from an attack that you helped orchestrate.” Piotr was crying now, silently, tears wetting his shirt over his stomach, but Staples hadn’t finished twisting the knife. “I don’t know why he charged into B17 by himself, but I can guess. He died thinking that the pirate attack was his fault, that it was his choice to take down coms and radar that allowed them to sneak up on us. And it’s true: they would have gotten the drop on us because of that, but they tried only because you had agreed to sabotage my ship.” She regarded him for a few seconds. Templeton and Jabir looked on.

“My ship!” she screamed at him, blood filling her face, the rage uncontrollable for just a second. Templeton put a hand on her shoulder, but she was calm again, and she shrugged it off without looking at him. “I have one more question for you, Piotr.” She hoped he would look at her again, but he continued to sit and sniffle. “Did you try to kill Parsells and Quinn?”

Chapter 14

Piotr Kondratyev stood in front of the crew and confessed his crimes. They were back in the mess hall, the de facto town hall of the ship, and it seemed to Staples that every time they returned here of late, her crew was smaller. She trusted the people arrayed in front of her to control themselves and to do the right thing, but prudence had still cautioned her to have Templeton explain to everyone several hours earlier most of what they would hear Piotr say. She wanted this to be about apology and acceptance of responsibility, not outrage and violent reactions. This time John had decided to sit out and keep Gwen with him; the last discussion had been more intense for her than either parent had liked. So now there were only eight crew members looking at her: Dinah, Charis, Bethany, Jabir, Jang, Ian, Declan, and Yoli faced their captain, her first mate, and the handcuffed cook who stood before them. Their passenger, her arms crossed on her chest, stood with the crew,.

              Piotr finished his explanation in his broken English and apologized, again, insisting that he was assured that no one would be hurt.

              “What about me?” asked Evelyn, taking several steps toward him, her arms dropping and her hands balling into fists. “How is losing my ability to do my job, to
think
, not hurting me?” Her lips were quivering, and she was obviously livid.

              Piotr just shook his head, refusing to meet her eyes.

              Staples redirected the moment by speaking up. “Piotr has one more thing to confess.” The bald cook looked at her with eyes beseeching, and she returned that gaze with steely resolve. He would get no mercy from her.

              “I…” he began, “I tried killing Parsells and Quinn.” It was clear that the majority of the room was not expecting this, and there was a chorus of shocked murmurs from nearly everyone. Dinah neither spoke nor looked around at the others.

              After the voices had subsided somewhat, Yoli spoke. “So what now, Captain? He betrayed our ship. He could have gotten all of us killed.” Her implication was clear, and it seemed others agreed with the cargo roadie. Staples doubted if many would object if she announced that she was going to throw Piotr out of an airlock, but that was not her plan.

              “We’ll already be seeking out a magistrate when we arrive at Cronos station so that we can hand over Parsells and Quinn and press charges. Now it looks like we’ll be sticking around for two trials.”

              Yoli snorted, obviously not satisfied, and she was not alone. Many ships, Staples knew, operated on their own system of justice. They weren’t supposed to, of course, but traveling on a space ship was much like plying the seas had been several hundred years earlier. The crew members on a boat might have been morally and legally obligated to follow the laws of their motherland, but in international waters with no one around to say otherwise and problems that needed addressing, it was easy to take the quick and dirty route. She did not doubt that many captains and their crews had pushed murderers and rapists out of airlocks and falsely reported their deaths as accidents. There were any number of ways to die in space, and space ships contained only the recording devices that their captains or their corporate sponsors allowed. Staples had made a very conscious choice to not make her ship into either a prison or a surveillance state, and so there were no cameras installed around the ship. She had regretted that decision on occasion, and more than once on this job specifically, but most of the time she would rather have a mystery on her hands than have a crew who felt as if she didn’t trust them. Trust, she had learned, works both ways.

              She decided to at least attempt to mollify them. “I know that not everyone agrees with my decision, or believes that these men will get what they deserve if we turn them over to a magistrate, but that is how we do things on this ship. Being a captain may give me the right to be a judge, but I have no interest in being one.”

              Yoli and Ian did not look happy, but there were no further challenges from them. After a moment of silence, Templeton spoke. “Look, we’re only five days out from Cronos Station, people. I know it’s been a hell of a trip, but we’re still flying, and we’re going to get there. We’ll get Ms. Schilling to her new post, drop these jokers off, get fixed up, and head home. Let’s just try to get through this, okay?” The question was rhetorical, and while no one answered, there were some nods and general noises of agreement from those assembled. Jang came forward to take Piotr back to his makeshift cell next to the cabin where they had deposited Quinn and Parsells in. As the rest of the crew filed out, Templeton leaned over to Staples and said under his breath, “I need to talk to you.”

              She nodded. She knew exactly what about.

              Staples walked into her neatly arranged room with Templeton on her heels yet again. As she turned around and he closed the door behind him, she said, “You know, if we keep this up, people will start to talk.” He did not laugh. “We could at least make it your place and not mine next time,” she tried again.

              Don Templeton put his fists on his hips and looked at her, his sandy grey head cocked to one side. “What are you going to do about Bethany trying to kill those men? Did you see her face when-”

              “When Piotr confessed to trying to kill them?” she interrupted him. “Oh, I saw it.”

              His eyes grew a bit wider with realization. “You knew. You knew it was her.”

              The last traces of levity left her face, and she pursed her lips and nodded. “I suspected.”

              “Since when?”

              “Since Dinah came here to confess. I don’t doubt that she’d die for every member of this crew, but there are only a few she’d lie for. Bethany was the most likely candidate. I don’t know what that girl’s been through, but it doesn’t take a psychologist to figure that she’s got trauma in her past.” She sat down at her seat on the table; a small ring of dirt from the dead plant still marked the surface near the wall. The plant itself resided in Medical with the doctor. “Would you sit down with me, please Don?”

              Reluctantly, he took a seat. “So what are you going to do?”

              “I’m going to talk to her.”

              “Talk? That’s it? I love that girl, you know I do, Clea, and she’s a hell of a pilot, but you can’t have her walking around free after she tried to kill someone on your ship. Hell, she basically did kill Quinn.”

              “And we’ll dearly miss him.” She couldn’t help the sarcasm.

              Anger clouded his face. “I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it - don’t you dare imply that I am - but you can’t just have members of your crew killing off other members of your crew. Not without your say-so, anyway.”

              “I can, actually, do anything I want on my ship. Everyone was thinking it up in the mess hall. But there’s a world of difference between executing a traitor and going easy on someone who punishes a criminal.”

              “You want to illustrate that difference for me?”

              She considered for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I don’t. I don’t think Bethany is a threat to anyone else on this ship.”

              “Really? Do you have any evidence for this thought? And what if she hears some rumor that my marriage ended because I brutalized my wife and kids, not because I’m gay, and she decides to slit my throat in my sleep?”

              “You didn’t brutalize anyone, Don, and it wasn’t a rumor that those men sexually assaulted Evelyn. It was a fact.” His look conveyed as well as it could
yes, but still
. “I respect your opinion, Don, and I always want to hear what you have to say, but this is how I’m going to handle this. I haven’t made my decision yet. I am going to talk to her. Then I’ll decide what to do about this. If anything.” She added the last two words to drive home to him that, in the end, her ship meant her rules.

              The man sitting across from her was clearly not fully content with this. “It’s not time to worry yet,” she added. “Let me talk to her and I’ll decide what to do. Then you can be angry with me if you like.”

              “That’s not good enough, Clea, not by half. You can’t just sweep this under the rug, and you can’t just swat her on the wrist because she did something you wanted to do but couldn’t. It’s not fair to her to use her as your Mr. Hyde.” Her eyes widened slightly, but before she could respond he barreled on. “Yeah, that’s right, I can make a literary reference too. And I’m not done. If I remember that book right, the poor guy spent so much time indulging his dark side that he couldn’t ever come back. You doing it through a proxy doesn’t make it any better. In fact, I think it makes it worse.” Veins strained in his neck and his breath was coming quickly, but he seemed to be done for the moment. 

              Clea kept his gaze for nearly a full minute after he had finished speaking. Finally, she looked away. “Maybe you’re right, Don. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “This is new territory for me. I just know that I can’t send Bethany away. I can’t lock her away either. I can’t turn her over. Can you imagine her in prison? Can we at least agree that that shouldn’t happen?”

              Templeton sat back and stared at the wall for a moment, then turned back to her. “I’m not convinced she doesn’t belong there, but I’ll say I can’t imagine it doing anything good for her. But Clea, she’s unstable, and that makes her dangerous.”

              “I’m not convinced of that,” Staples responded almost from instinct, then cut off his objection before he could make it. “To anyone besides Quinn and Parsells. Just… just let me talk to her. I’ll decide from there. It
is
my ship.”

              Templeton was clearly still angry. “Yeah, it’s your ship. You can kick us all off and run it anyway you like.”

              Staples’ tone softened. “I don’t want that, Don. That’s why I’m asking you, not telling you, to trust me.”

              He sighed and said, “All right. But if you don’t deal with this right, it’s going to come back to haunt you.” He seemed to push the subject to the back burner for the moment, but there was another pot ready to boil over. “It’s also worth mentioning that you basically just lied to your whole crew.”

              “And I wish I could say that it was the first time I’ve ever done that, but it’s not. The truth may come out at some point, and I’ll deal with it if it does, but in the meantime, I can’t have the crew looking at their pilot, the person who handles some of the most sensitive and dangerous situations on this ship, as a murderer. We’ve been through enough on this job. We don’t need to lose any more faith in each other.”

              “Do you still trust her to do that job?” he pressed.

              She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Absolutely. The job? Yes. Whether she can function as a member of this crew, well, that’s why I want to speak with her.”

              He was pensive for a minute, then begrudgingly assented. “All right. I don’t know if I trust her, but I trust you.”

              “Thank you.” She smiled a bit, but it was tight and brief.

              “How did you get Piotr to agree to confess to that in front of the crew if he didn’t do it? Does he know about Bethany?”

              “No, he doesn’t know about Bethany. And while I thought there was a chance that he might agree to confess to protect her, I couldn’t count on it, and I couldn’t take the chance of telling him that I was all but sure that she did it. So I offered him a deal.”

              “What kind of deal?” He leaned forward, equal parts curiosity and skepticism.

              “We’ll be leaving him on Cronos Station. If, and this is a big if, we can get someone to hire him as a cook there, we’ll skip the trial. Instead, I’ll tell his manager what he did and provide them with all the evidence to prove it. Piotr will stay on that station for the rest of his life.”

              “That’s not much better than spending the rest of his life in a jail. Why would he agree to that?”

              “Because if he does, I will give his cut from this job to his sister and her kids. As long as he is working, he can send money to her as well. He may never get to see his sister or his nieces and nephews again, but they’ll grow up thinking he’s a great guy who took a job in space to get them money, rather than a turncoat who betrayed his crew and got a fellow countryman killed. If he ever leaves that station, I’ll turn all of the evidence over to the authorities and ruin his name.”

              “And what about that story you just spun to everyone about putting him in front of a local judge?”

              “Once everyone’s calmed down a bit and they’re not looking to lynch anyone, I’ll tell them about the deal, minus the part where he unwittingly covered for Bethany.” Templeton’s face was still somewhat accusatory. “It’s not a lie, Don. I don’t need to tell them
when
I made that deal.”             

“You’re still playing fast and loose here.” He thought for a moment and then added. “That’s actually a hell of a deal you’re giving him. He’s lucky to have you as a captain, or he was. But knowing what he is and what he’s done, do you really think you can talk someone into taking him on?”