Vykron was quick to agree. It took Ellison longer.
I caught her quick glance of appraisal at the Ethnarch. Defeat would not make her popular, however much it really was not her fault. They would have promoted her if she had wiped out the whole Avarak world. She had to be thinking about her own future.
I didn’t think she would get reassurance from Locke. It was obvious to me that he was never going to accept responsibility for this. Why would he? It would be too easy to spin it as a major failing of the Eighth Fleet. This fiasco was going to mean the end of her career in the Omnistate.
After some moments she came to the same realization. Her jaw hardened. She was going to do what she perceived as her duty anyway. She nodded. “We agree.”
Locke began to fade. The missiles were now past the no-return point. The RAMP menace had been contained. The Chakrans were sending him back to Earth. If he had ever been here in the first place. For all I knew we could have been looking at a mirage. Yet, somehow, I rather thought we hadn’t. The impression I had was that the real Ethnarch of Sol had been standing in front of us. It sounded quite impossible. It was a day for impossible things to happen.
The war was over. Our first mission was over – a success. Yet the idea that the Chakrans could inflate the space between the molecules of animate and inanimate things just by thinking about it made me feel somewhat queasy.
All of our lives had just changed. Again.
Admiral Ellison got to her feet. She seemed much older than when she had sat down. I almost even felt sorry for her. Then I remembered that she and her people had been within an hour of mass genocide. The sympathy evaporated. Even so, I offered her my hand as she made to leave.
She ignored it. “What happened here has changed the Major Shells,” she said, her voice accusing.
“It has,” I replied, trying to keep my tone even. “For the better.”
Nobody could have missed the flash of anger in her eyes. “Cunningham should have killed you when he had the chance.”
I ignored that. I escorted first the Terrans, and then the Avaraks to their own shuttles. It was a relief to watch both shuttles fly safely out of the bow doors of the cargo bay. The Avaraks turned to starboard, the Terrans to port.
Maybe all career officers were taught that particular tone when they were commissioned, I mused, as I made my way back to Nivala’s bridge. That wonderful way of blaming everyone except yourself. It had been a particular strength of Captain Tevis’s, too.
That led me back to the days on Commorancy. They felt such a long way back in my past. They had been hazy days of some sort of innocence. Days of illusion. Days of a status quo that we thought would last eternally. All that was long gone, along with poor old Commorancy herself, the first casualty to the war we had just ended.
I wondered where Captain Tevis was now, and whether I would ever run into him again.
I had reached the bridge without realizing it. Zenzie, who had been waiting for me by the hatchway, tugged at my arm. “Why are you looking grim?”
I shook my head. “Sorry. I was just thinking about Commorancy.”
Her crest drooped. “Yes. Too many people have died.”
“They have.”
She gave my arm a quick squeeze. “I am glad you found me, back on Commorancy.”
“You don’t regret the Savior Protocols?”
“I do not.” She gave a couple of little skips. “We are the Interstellar Enforcement Agency now. We can go wherever we want.”
“Wherever we are needed,” I corrected.
She waved away my doubts. “Now we can begin to have some fun! Where next?” She put her arms out and pirouetted away.
Sammy had somehow procured two bottles of champagne and all of Nivala’s crew had congregated around them. He handed me a glass. Everyone was chattering together and laughing as they watched our new Chyzar dancing around and around the bridge in ever larger circles.
I held up my flute of champagne to toast them all.
Where next, indeed?
Next in series:
Interdicted Space
(Interstellar Enforcement Agency, Book 2)
Termination Shock Page 34
