He woke again to an incoming call from sickbay—Dr. Simmons reminding him that he would need to report to the Central Command doctor if he was to be excused from duty another day. Her personal notes would cut it no longer. A potent strain of dekaflu, she’d told them. One common to the Deep Black, but rare around the center of the system. Should it spread through Central Command, it could cripple the power structure of the United Systems for weeks.
A bit dramatic for Bayne’s tastes, but it did the trick. No one had dared to speak to him since they docked a week ago. He was free to sink into his bottles, which were routinely replenished by Wilco. He made a mental note to ask the boy where he’d managed to acquire so many bottles of Bacconium rum in the most uptight place in the galaxy.
The thought of rum made his stomach churn. He lurked near the toiled a moment until he was sure his insides were content to remain on the inside. Once satisfied, he opened his closet to find his uniform cleaned and pressed, hanging like a trophy in a case. Or like a dead deer, gutted and stuffed and made to look like it was still alive, a twisted attempt to cling to something that died a long time ago. Something that never truly existed.
Mao had seen to cleaning it. He had picked it up off the floor himself after Bayne unceremoniously discarded it in a drunken fit. The executive officer had seen to many responsibilities in the last week, like insulating the crew of the Royal Blue from the captain’s downward spiral. They, too, believed him ill. Only Mao, Dr. Simmons, and the pirate boy knew the truth.
But that buffer was gone the moment Bayne stepped out of his cabin in uniform.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Delphyne said with a salute. “Glad to see you up and about, sir.”
Bayne returned a half-hearted salute. He played up the ghostly color in his cheeks, the red in his eyes, letting her assume them the reason for his lack of enthusiasm at spotting the tablet in her hands.
“The XO sent me to update you, sir. I wasn’t sure you’d be ready for a briefing, hearing the state you’ve been in. I’d just as soon preferred you rest until you’re fully recovered and ready for duty.” Her face flushed. “Not that you don’t look fully recovered, sir. Or ready for duty. I would never presume to…” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, it seems the XO has a bit of a gift for precognition. He was sure you’d be up.”
Precognition. Or maybe it was the XO that pressured the good doctor to threaten him with a visit to the Central doctors.
Bayne gestured for the tablet. “What briefing?”
Delphyne handed it over, careful not to touch him and contract his rare and fictitious strain of flu. “The ship’s due for inspection. We’ve rescheduled with Central Engineering two times already. The Director of Engineering is becoming agitated.”
Bayne bit back the curses that flooded his mind and instead said, “Have Callet schedule a new inspection as soon as possible. The sooner it’s done, the sooner we can depart.”
“Yes, sir,” Delphyne said, making a note on her own tablet, which cloned the display of Bayne’s.
They scrolled through several clerical items, simple tasks that merely needed his authorization. Mao could have handled them. He chose not to do them out of spite, Bayne concluded. Mao knew how little he cared for the administrative hoops he was made to jump through while docking at Central.
“What is this?” Bayne pointed to an item near the bottom of the list.
Delphyne deflated with a sigh, like she knew his resistance was coming. “Admiral Ayala has ordered full debriefs and psychological evaluations of the crew.”
Bayne’s temples pulsed with a fresh rush of hot blood. It made his head throb and his stomach churn. “We aren’t due for full evals for another tour. Simple debriefs should be enough.”
“She was rather insistent, sir.”
Bayne shoved the tablet into Delphyne’s hands. He marched past her, chewing a string of salty curses.
“Sir,” Delphyne called. “They’ve already begun, the evals. About an hour ago.”
“Who have they spoke to?”
“Just two so far,” Delphyne said. “They’re still with the admiral, actually.”
“Who?” Bayne insisted.
“The boys. Wilco and Hepzah.”
The fumes of the docking bay made Bayne feel drunk again, which actually made his hangover manageable. The noise did nothing for his headache, though. It was a constant cacophony rumbling engines and shrieking equipment as they disassembled and reassembled machine parts, the steady roar of voices and tires and mechs as they thudded across the floor, hauling tools and supplies.
He had yet to step foot off the Royal Blue since docking. It had been a year since his last visit to Central. Visit made it sound pleasant. Remand was more accurate. The place felt like a prison, like it was made with the sole purpose of confining, crushing, and conforming. He made it a habit to keep his remands as short as possible, as dictated by protocol, of course. The standard docking of a deep space vessel after a tour was one month. Bayne’s friendly relationship with Admiral Ayala allowed him some flexibility with that, but that goodwill had since been spent.
Bayne caught his fair share of sidelong glances as he walked through the bustling docking bay. He’d had a reputation even before his last tour in the Deep Black. An assumption followed the Rangers that he was only now allowing himself to see. The assumption that they were vagabonds, ruffians, Navy captains only by the grace of Central Command when they should be drowning themselves in rum on some backwater planet praying some shipping jobs would pass their way. One step away from being pirates.
How could he not have noticed until now? How could he have saluted these people not knowing the venom they held in their mouths just waiting for the opportunity to spit it in his eyes? His face burned. Sweat beaded on his brow. Embarrassment or another surge of rum rushing out of his gut? It didn’t matter. They felt the same.
He kept his eyes forward and focused on keeping his feet under him.
Central Command was a bustling place, one of the many reasons Bayne disliked it so much. It was a massive space station that housed the military command, intelligence, and administrative apparatus of the entire United Systems. Being such, it contained an eclectic mix of people. Bureaucrats, intelligence officers, career soldiers, mechanics, engineers, support staff. All a very different sort from each other. Which led to the need for the man who approached Bayne as he exited the docking bay into a connecting corridor.
“It’s about time you hauled yourself out of bed,” the man said. He was in his late thirties. Dark-skinned. A broad man, though not tall. Barrel-chested. His arms were thick, and his hands were meaty. “Figured you were faking it, but, by the looks of you, I see I was wrong.” He clasped Bayne’s hand in a knuckle-crushing shake. “You look like crap, Drum.”
“And I feel it, Cluster.”
Simon Cluster, the Chief Magistrate of Central Command, tasked with keeping order among the varied sorts housed on the station. Such a mix brought no small amount of friction. His job was relentless and did not entail acting as a welcoming party.
“No one announced me,” Bayne said, trying to maintain the friendly nature of their meeting thus far. “You had people watching my ship.”
“That I did,” Cluster said. “Alerted me the second your feet touched my deck, as were their orders, as were my orders.”
“Ayala?”
“Only one I take orders from,” Cluster said.
Bayne’s stomach bubbled again. She had eyes on him everywhere. He could feel them digging into him like ticks. And now she was questioning his crew. Did she suspect something? Did she know that he’d met with Parallax? Did she know who Parallax really was? What he said, there, in the corpse of the Supernova?
“You sure you should be up and about?” Cluster asked, seeming to sense the shifting and roiling inside Bayne.
“I’m fine,” Bayne said. “What does she want?”
Cluster tightened at Bayne’s tone. He was friendly, a comrade, but in no way disloyal to
the Navy or Admiral Ayala. Never a bad word beyond some cordial griping at the water cooler. “To be kept apprised of your whereabouts.” Cluster’s voice became more formal and rigid.
Of course. All eyes on him. She wanted him tagged like a dog, so she could shoot him down in a dark alley when he stopped coming to her whistle. “You know where I can find the two boys I took aboard my ship?”
Cluster was quiet but said plenty with the set of his jaw.
“You can’t say,” Bayne said. “Understood. I’ll find them on my own.”
Cluster stopped him with a firm, meaty hand on his chest. “Keep your head about you.” His voice was still wrought with tension but laced with a bit of concern.
Bayne said nothing until Cluster dropped his hand. “Good seeing you, Cluster.” He walked away, feeling the chief magistrate’s eye burning into his back.
The administrative offices of Central Command may have been Bayne’s least favorite place in the entire known galaxy. The air felt heavier there, like it was laced with something meant to press down on you, just so you knew your place as soon as you walked in. That way, the bureaucrats inside had a head start in making you feel insignificant.
“Have a seat, Captain,” the portly woman at the reception desk said after Bayne announced himself and his purpose. “Someone will be with you shortly.”
“I don’t want anyone to be with me,” Bayne said. “I want to know if the two boys who came aboard the Royal Blue are inside being debriefed.”
The woman narrowed her gaze at Bayne through thick-rimmed glasses. “Have a seat, Captain.”
Bayne’s insides bubbled again, not from the rum twisting his guts, but from the anger he’d been using the rum to drown. The righteous jut of her chin. The dismissive tone in her voice. The panic button toward which her sausage fingers had inched, just aching to press it and summon some lowly thug to do her dirty work so she could go about filing and making reports and adjusting her ergonomic chair.
Bureaucrats. Making the dirty decisions and forcing others to carry them out. Looking down their noses at the sweaty brows of those who suffered at their leisure, who toiled for meager pay in a system whose only function was to give the bureaucrats relevance.
The sort who ordered the deaths of dozens of Rangers because they bucked that system.
He wanted to break her sausage fingers.
But a voice from behind him dissolved that desire. “Captain?”
Hep, the younger and smaller of the two boys, the more fragile one. He seemed as much, at least. Borderline sickly, Bayne thought. But there was also something always lurking just the beneath the surface, something Bayne could see in his eyes that shone through the fatigue of constant struggle. Something that could be strength. But it could be something else.
“You looking for me?” the boy asked.
Bayne steered Hep away from the woman and spoke with a quiet voice. “Aye, and Wilco.”
“They’re still talking to him.”
“Who?”
Hep’s brow wrinkled. “Bunch of stuffy folks. Some captains. An admiral.”
“Ayala?”
Hep nodded. “Said they were some kind of council of whatever.”
“The Joint Council,” Bayne said. He spit the name. “Dammit.” The top-ranked captains of the United Navy, Admiral Ayala, its highest-ranking officer, and the chancellors of each system. The most powerful people in the United Systems.
He ushered Hep out of the administrative offices. He pressed the boy against the wall in the corridor and stooped to look him in the eye. “What did they ask you?”
Hep shifted uneasily, looking claustrophobic. “How we came to be on your ship. They didn’t much care about anything before that. But they mostly wanted to know about Ore Town.”
“They ask about Parallax?”
Hep shook his head. “Just Ore Town, really. That’s why Wilco is still in there.”
The other boy had spent time in the mining outpost with Mao. He helped save Bayne’s life from the so-called magistrate of Ore Town, Jervis Tetch, a pirate once called Wormhole. An act that saved Bayne’s life. Both boys had saved Bayne and his crew. That was before he knew they were pirates.
Did that matter?
He was thinking like a Navy captain. He was a Navy captain. He was for now, at least. Until he chose what to do next.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Hepzah asked.
Bayne felt a twinge of guilt for not having given the thought any consideration. “I’ll see that you’re taken care of.”
The sentiment didn’t seem to give Hep any relief. “What does that mean? That we’re taken to another orphanage? Enlisted in the Youth Academy? Or executed as pirates?”
Bayne shushed the boy. “If you don’t keep your voice down, you’ll see to that yourself.” He directed Hep toward the eastern corridor, which led back to the Blue. “I told you I’d take care of it. Get back to the ship, now, so I can do as I said.”
Hep didn’t bother to resist. He marched away, chin to his chest.
Bayne’s heart pumped ice water through his veins as he walked back into the office. The receptionist stood from her desk and blocked Bayne’s path with her body.
“You will take a seat, Captain, or I will call the magistrates.”
Bayne didn’t bother to answer. He stepped around her and found his way to the council chamber.
The eyes of the Joint Council fell on him when barged in.
2
The war was days over when he had first met Admiral Shay Ayala. She was older than him by a decade and wielded that experience like a rapier, fine and surgical. Others he’d met, senior officers and captains alike, wielded everything like hammers, smashing and pounding.
The Rangers required more finesse. Bargains needed striking if your ship was to stay fueled and notice of incoming jobs was to be sent your way. With no formal regulation, Ranger captain territories were negotiated. There was no word from on high that instantly settled any debate. Things were discussed. The discussions were a dance.
There was no dancing in the Navy.
That was a concept to which Bayne had trouble adapting at first. His interactions with other captains, career Navy captains, were awkward and left him feeling embarrassed and bitter. He felt them looking down on him. It was enough to push him out of the captain’s chair, had Admiral Ayala not convinced him to do otherwise.
She guided him toward making the decision to remain in the Navy, to sail with a new purpose, to serve something beyond himself.
“Why did you become a Ranger?” she asked him.
He was confused by the question. He was still wary of the Navy command structure, so rigid and formal, every answer scrutinized on a level he wasn’t used to. He looked for double meanings where there were none.
“You can speak freely,” Ayala said.
Even that fell on Bayne in a way she hadn’t intended. Rangers always spoke freely. To be given permission to do so was a foreign concept. The need to ask for it felt perverse.
“Freedom, ma’am.”
“And why the Navy?”
“To serve the United Systems, ma’am.”
Her face cracked with a smile. “Bull.”
Her candor was refreshing. Her choice of words familiar. “I want my own ship. There was no guarantee of that had I stayed a Ranger.”
“No guarantee of it in the Navy either.”
“More of a likelihood though, ma’am. Keeping the ship fueled and the crew fed was becoming harder. At least this way, I know those things are guaranteed.” But the cost was high, Bayne knew. Which made Ayala’s reminder all the more bitter.
“You know that in joining the Navy, not only do you become a commissioned officer, but your ship becomes an official Navy vessel.” She waited for that to sink in. And then decided to nail it in. “Meaning she isn’t your ship anymore. You captain it, but it belongs to the United Systems.”
Swallowing became a conscious effort. He could fly, but it meant helming s
omeone else’s ship. He could have given it all up and taken a mining job somewhere, or risked his crew turning on him because he couldn’t afford to pay them, or instead settle for a fraction of the freedom he desired. If one could even have a fraction of freedom. At the moment, it felt like it was just slightly less oppressive.
“Understood,” Bayne said.
The admiral walked around the front of her desk so there was nothing separating them. She leaned back on it and crossed her arms, adopting a stance to match her candor, nothing so formal. “I know what you’re giving up. And I don’t take that sacrifice lightly. I appreciate what the Rangers did during the war and I mean to make good on the promise of the whole bloody affair.”
For the first time since taking the bargain, Bayne had felt like it might have been the right choice and not just the only choice. She twisted around, grabbed a stack of paper from her desk, and came back wearing a smile—one of the only times Bayne could remember seeing one on her face.
She dropped it on the small, round table next to Bayne and handed him a pen. “You’re still fighting for freedom. You’re just fighting for the freedom of everyone in the United Systems, not just yourself.”
He still remembered the fluttering in his belly when he signed those papers, when he formally signed his life away. That romantic notion of being a warrior, a protector, a righteous soldier pointing the spearhead at the enemies of freedom.
Now, staring at the Joint Council and Admiral Ayala, he wished he’d told her to eat that stack of paperwork. He wished he had taken the Deep Blue and sailed it into the nearest star instead of turning it into the UNS Royal Blue.
“What is the meaning of this?” a fat man wearing a crimson uniform demanded. He seemed like the sort of person who loved to be outraged, a victim whenever he got the chance. “How dare you interfere in a meeting of the Joint Council. I have never—”
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 10
