The Caphenon

by Fletcher DeLancey

  “Lieutenant, resume course to the Gavinaught.”

  “Resuming course.” Candini shot her a huge smile before turning back to her controls.

  “I’m taking you all to the Gavinaught,” Ekatya said, sweeping her gaze across her crew. “And then I’m coming back here to do what I can against the Voloth.”

  “I had a feeling,” Baldassar said. “Ever since I realized you and Dr. Rivers were lovers. I saw you holding hands on stage at the funeral. And Dr. Rivers has developed quite a habit of calling you by your first name. When were you going to tell me, by the way?”

  “I wanted to. But it would have put you in the same compromised position I was in.”

  “You mean the position of knowing that you had a conflict of interest? The same conflict of interest that’s made you incapable of carrying out your duties? You just disobeyed orders and left advanced Protectorate technology for the Voloth to find. You know it’s wrong, but you did it for your lover.”

  “No. I did it because I’m not going to vaporize over a thousand Alseans just because they trust their leader. I don’t want that on my conscience.” And because Lancer Tal was more ruthless than she would ever have believed.

  “Captain, I know this is going to sound harsh, but…they’re dead anyway.”

  “You’re right, it sounds harsh. And not every order is correct, or moral, or even legal.” It was as if her subconscious mind had made the decision in spite of all the agonizing her conscious mind had done. She just wished it had informed her earlier. “This is not the right answer, Commander. There has to be a better way than simply handing the Alseans over to the Voloth. Especially considering that the Voloth wouldn’t even know about them if it weren’t for us. We dug the trap and now we’re going to throw them in it? I don’t find that correct or moral. And the fact that it’s legal says more about our laws than it does about Alsea.”

  “It’s not our place to decide which orders are moral or correct. If the order is legal, we carry it out. You’ve broken that trust, so I have no choice. Captain Serrado, I am relieving you of duty. As of now I am in command of the Caphenon and this crew.” He looked around at the faces staring at him. “You know it has to be done. The captain has lost her perspective and she’s endangering a peace treaty between the Protectorate and the Voloth.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You know,” Torado said, crossing his arms over his broad chest, “Gehrain carried me out of that weapons room. He didn’t even know aliens existed before that, and he couldn’t communicate with me, but he saved me. I couldn’t figure out why we were abandoning them anyway, and now I’m glad they’ve got a chance. You’ll not get my support, Commander.”

  “I’m with Torado,” said Roris.

  “Me too.” Blunt’s voice was quiet but determined. Ennserhofen just nodded at Torado.

  “I wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for them,” Mauji Mauji said. “Count me out of your mutiny.”

  “It’s not a mutiny,” Baldassar said in exasperation. “It’s my duty! When the captain can’t carry out her duties, the first officer has to take over.”

  “I don’t care what you call it,” Hmongyon said. “They saved me, too. I’m with the captain.”

  Xi didn’t say anything, and Ekatya guessed he would have supported Baldassar if the others had. Since they didn’t, he was going to take the safe road. Candini and Kameha weren’t even in the equation; she knew they wouldn’t support this.

  “Try relieving me of duty after we board the Gavinaught,” she suggested. “Right now it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve always admired your ability to instill loyalty. It’s one of the reasons I wanted a post on your ship. It’s also why I bypassed the voice controls on the Caphenon.”

  Her eyes widened when he pulled the detonator out of his jacket pocket.

  “Baldassar, no!” She launched herself out of the seat at the same time that three other bodies rushed him. Baldassar went down hard, the detonator flying from his hand to skitter across the deck. Ekatya scrambled after it, swearing as it slid beneath a seat. Behind her, the struggle ended with a thud of flesh on flesh.

  “He’s out,” Torado said, but Ekatya wasn’t listening. She’d finally gotten her fingers on the detonator and was staring at it in dismay.

  “Oh, no. No!”

  “Captain, the Caphenon is powering up,” Candini said.

  Ekatya threw the detonator onto the deck and stabbed her wristcom again.

  “Lancer Tal, pull everyone back now! The self-destruct has been initiated; you’ve got five ticks!”

  The Lancer didn’t respond. Had she pressed something besides the recall button?

  She was just punching in the full code when she heard Lancer Tal’s voice, but not from her wristcom. It was coming from the back.

  “Commander Kameha, please give me some good news.”

  “Power levels are coming up normally.” Kameha’s fingers danced over the shuttle’s engineering console. “A little sooner than I expected, but the end result will be the same. The Caphenon is ready for action. Treat her well, Lancer Tal, she was my baby.”

  Ekatya’s jaw dropped.

  “We’ll treat her with the utmost respect. Thank you for your help, and for sharing your knowledge. I wish you could stay with us.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded it, actually. Seems to me I might have learned a few things from you.”

  “Far less than we could have learned from you. And Commander Kameha—you’re released. You owe me nothing. Live your life free and well.”

  “Good-bye, Lancer Tal,” Kameha said.

  Ekatya’s wristcom buzzed, and she lifted it in a daze. “What have you done?”

  “Don’t blame Commander Kameha. He was operating under…an alien influence. It’s not his fault and he shouldn’t be held responsible.”

  Kameha shrugged. “Hold me responsible all you want. It was the right thing to do.”

  “Don’t listen to him. On every other topic, yes, but not on this one. And Captain, this is just a formality at this point, but the Alsean government is officially claiming the Caphenon as salvage. Your government abandoned it. We’ll take better care of it. Safe journey, and may Fahla fly with you.”

  The wristcom went dead, and Ekatya sat heavily in the copilot’s seat. She had just been outmaneuvered at every turn. Worse, she’d lost Lhyn in the process. She hadn’t lived up to Lhyn’s expectations, so Lhyn had stayed with the woman who did. Lancer Tal didn’t have Ekatya’s handicap. She wasn’t beholden to an overarching authority, she was the authority. And now she had both Lhyn and the Caphenon.

  “Captain?”

  She closed her eyes. “What now, Lieutenant?”

  “We’ve got another problem.”

  Somewhere, somehow, she was certain that the universe was laughing at her.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re losing our flight controls. It’s the same thing that happened to the fighter.” The words were hardly out of Candini’s mouth when a slight shudder went through the shuttle’s frame.

  “How in Hades—”

  “I don’t know, but we were wrong. It’s not the Voloth. It’s something here. This shuttle was never exposed to anything Voloth.”

  Kameha made his way up from the back. “Did I hear that right? The shuttle’s hullskin—”

  “—is disintegrating, yes. We’re not going to make it into orbit.”

  “Stars and Shippers,” Ekatya swore. “It was them all along.” That woman had known she couldn’t leave.

  “We’re going to have to put down,” Candini said. “Where should I land?”

  “Well, there’s not much choice, is there? Anywhere we go, we’re marked. They’ll take us back to Blacksun anyway, so we might as well save them the effort. And I’d rather arrive on my own terms.”

  It was all she had left.

  Chapter 46

  The challenge

  Any guilt Ekatya
might have felt for even considering killing a thousand Alseans slipped beneath her outrage as she marched down the corridor, bracketed by Guards front and rear. Their shuttle had been met over Blacksun by four armed transports and told to land at the State House. She’d been disarmed the moment she stepped out, as had the rest of her crew. They’d even found Roris’s sleeve knife. And now her crew was sequestered in some heavily guarded room while she was being “escorted” to see Lancer Tal, the woman who had promised her any favor she could grant and betrayed her instead.

  They stopped in front of a heavy pair of carved and inlaid wooden doors, which silently opened inward when Colonel Micah pressed his hand to the biolock panel. Four of the Guards took up posts on either side of the entrance while the rest accompanied her across the plush carpet and through the beautifully furnished anteroom to another door, this one half the size but no less gorgeous. Ekatya noticed the emblem of the tree on it before it, too, opened inward.

  “Lancer Tal,” said Colonel Micah in his low rumble, “Captain Serrado is here.”

  “Bring her in.”

  The colonel stood aside and held out a hand, following immediately behind when Ekatya stepped past him. The other Guards remained outside.

  Lancer Tal was walking out from behind a wooden desk whose apparent age and carvings matched those of the door. The wall of glass at her back looked out onto the park, and Ekatya’s anger kicked up a notch at the sight of it. Her ship had made that glass. Her people had handed it over to the Alseans. All in the name of cooperation, of aid, and all this time…

  “I hoped you’d return,” Lancer Tal said, now standing in front of her. “But not like this.”

  “Not like what? Not like an idiot who got taken in by the oldest game in the books?”

  “You’re the furthest thing from an idiot.”

  “And you’re the furthest thing from the honorable woman I thought you were. You knew I’d come back, because you knew I couldn’t get off this planet. Why didn’t you tell me? What game were you playing?”

  “I didn’t know, Captain. That was as much a surprise to me as it was to you. And not a good one.”

  Ekatya was taken aback. She didn’t know? Then what was destroying their hullskin?

  The Lancer’s last statement sank in, and she understood. “You wanted my fighters.”

  “Yes. But they all have hullskin, so none of them will fly. We’re almost as shekked as if you’d managed to blow the Caphenon after all. Except I haven’t lost a thousand warriors yet.”

  The reminder of how she’d been outmaneuvered pushed her temper right back to the brink. “What did you do to Commander Kameha?”

  “What I had to.” Lancer Tal gestured at the small conference table. “Would you like to sit down?”

  “No, I don’t want to sit down! Do you really think we’re going to talk about this like reasonable people? One of us is not reasonable! One of us manipulated an honorable man into betraying his captain!”

  “I didn’t manipulate him,” she said in that infuriatingly calm tone. “I compelled him. There’s a difference.”

  “What do you mean, compelled?”

  With a sigh and a glance at the table, Lancer Tal evidently gave up on sitting and crossed her arms over her chest. “I empathically forced him.”

  She didn’t know why that shocked her so much. Of course it had been her first thought, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  “You told me that was the highest crime an Alsean could commit.”

  “It is, if it’s done without a warrant. I had a warrant.”

  “How lovely. And just how many of my crew did you have warrants for?”

  “All of them.”

  “Of course.” Ekatya looked up at the ceiling, trying to get herself under control. And to think she had apologized to this ruthless manipulator for suspecting her of exactly—

  “Except you.”

  “What?” Startled into meeting her eyes, she saw what looked like regret. “Why not?”

  “Because I was in your debt. We were all in your debt. I wanted to keep you out of this if I could. And, well, I was hoping you wouldn’t need it.”

  The implication hung in the air. I was hoping you’d refuse that order on your own.

  Lhyn had tried so hard to convince her. And when all persuasion had failed, she’d stayed behind. A galaxy-class ultimatum: go and lose Lhyn to the Lancer, or stay and destroy her career.

  All of them, she heard again, and then she understood. Lhyn hadn’t done that on her own. She’d been empathically forced. Twice Lancer Tal had brought her back to the base late at night; this morning she’d been in Alsean clothing and holding the Lancer’s hand. Ekatya’s imagination easily filled in the blanks, and her body went hot with rage.

  Lancer Tal uncrossed her arms and shifted her weight, a subtle readiness response that made Ekatya even angrier. How could someone so tuned to emotions have so few compunctions about abusing them?

  “You low-bellied slime worm,” she growled. “You spineless torquat!”

  Both Lancer Tal and Colonel Micah looked puzzled, and Ekatya’s frustration mounted. She couldn’t even insult this woman, for Shipper’s sake; it didn’t translate!

  Calling on everything she had learned about these people, she took a step into the Lancer’s personal space and said, “You motherless outcaste. You have no honor. You’re not fit to even be in the warrior caste, much less lead it.”

  For a moment she was grimly satisfied to see both of them react. Finally, she’d found the words that meant something.

  Then she was stumbling backwards, her head snapped back by the force of a palm strike to her chin. She hadn’t even seen Lancer Tal move. Barely catching herself in time, she straightened and turned with only one thought in her mind—and found herself facing the immovable wall of Colonel Micah.

  He shook his head at her. “She’s wrong. You are an idiot.”

  “Micah, it’s all right,” Lancer Tal said from behind him.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Micah. She’s not going to hurt me.”

  Oh, but she wanted to, and Colonel Micah’s expression said he knew it. But he stepped aside anyway, obedient to the last woman on this planet who deserved it.

  “Do you know what you’ve just done?” Lancer Tal asked, calm once again.

  “Told a betraying little shit what she really is? Yes.”

  The slur had no effect on the Lancer’s expression. “I strongly suggest you retract your words and apologize, right now.”

  “I did apologize to you once. Remember that? Do you remember exactly what it was I apologized for? Yes, I can see that you do. Well, I am sorry—that I fell for your act. And the odds of me ever apologizing to you again are so low that it would take Kameha’s lab equipment to measure them. Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Then I accept your challenge. Micah?”

  “Where do you want to do this?” he asked, almost casually taking Ekatya’s upper arm in his vise-like grip.

  “Training room,” she said. He nodded and began to pull Ekatya toward the door.

  “Wait a minute!” Ekatya dug in her heels, but it was like trying to stop a boulder in motion. “What are you talking about? I didn’t challenge you.”

  “And that’s why you’re an idiot.” Colonel Micah opened the door and pulled her through.

  The Guards in the antechamber snapped to attention, relaxing only when Lancer Tal said, “Settle. We’re going to the training room; make sure no one else enters it.”

  “Yes, Lancer,” Gehrain said, looking at Ekatya. He seemed sad, and she turned her head to keep him in sight as she was pulled through the room.

  Trooper Blunt. She’d had a crush on Gehrain from practically the moment she’d laid eyes on him. And he’d spent quite a lot of time with her. Ekatya had thought it was cute.

  She didn’t think it was cute anymore.

  “He compelled her, didn’t he?” she asked Lancer Tal, who was now preceding them down t
he corridor. “Trooper Blunt.”

  “Yes.” The Lancer didn’t look back.

  “Don’t you people have any shame at all?”

  Neither of them answered her.

  They turned and turned again, finally arriving at a lift and boarding it in silence. No one broke it while they descended, and when the doors opened again, Ekatya glimpsed the lobby she’d first seen upon entering this building what felt like years ago. They were on the ground floor, then.

  They must have walked all the way around to the back side of the State House before finally stopping in front of a door that had a light fixture over it. The Guards took up their positions while Lancer Tal activated the door, which slid open to reveal an enormous sunken room. The walls were hung with colored banners and weapons of all shapes and sizes, and in many places the floor was lined with soft mats. Level with the corridor was a wooden observation platform with a waist-high railing around it. Like everything else in this building, the wood was old and polished, but the shiniest part of all was the top. Generations of warriors had probably rested their arms there, watching the activity below.

  Ekatya had only a moment to take it in before she was escorted to the right side of the platform and down three stairs to the floor, where she was finally released. She refused to rub her arm where Colonel Micah had gripped her so tightly, instead glaring at the Lancer as she descended the steps. “Now are you going to explain what this is?”

  “This is a challenge. You insulted my honor; I can’t let that stand. You’ll have to back up your words. If you were Alsean, I’d tell you to pick your weapon. But I have no desire to harm you any more than we already have, so I think we should do this with hand-to-hand.” She glanced at Colonel Micah, who gave a single nod.

  “You’re kidding. This is how you solve your disagreements, by fighting?”

  “No, we solve our disagreements through our justice system and the governance of the caste houses and the Council. But this isn’t a disagreement. It’s a challenge—which you initiated, so don’t blame our culture.”

  She’d blame their culture, all right. This culture had screwed with the minds of all of her crew. Everyone except her, and why was she left out? Because they thought they could control her through Lhyn. They’d turned Lhyn into someone else, a brainwashing victim who wore Alsean clothing and held the Lancer’s hand. That the very people she’d tried to save, the people three of her crew had died to save, would do this…if she’d known, she’d have let that Voloth invader do its worst.