Hope's Folly

by Linnea Sinclair

  He grunted, scowling.

  She leaned to her right and pulled up the closest deskscreen. Her security code brought up the files she’d saved after Commo—Mather left her office. “He transferred off the Waldor Rey to the Nowicki, about three years ago. That makes sense. A few other things don’t, in light of what happened.”

  Philip angled his face toward her. “Olefar was the Rey’s captain.”

  Olefar. Amazing how much could be transmitted through tone and three syllables. Philip didn’t like the man any more than her father had. “I thought he still was.”

  “He got the Masting after Tage—” He stopped, eyes darkening. “He was rewarded for his loyalty.”

  “Mather wasn’t. He got an EFS-Gold and went nowhere. He was still third commo when the Nowicki took him.” Or did he really go nowhere? Maybe his promotions, unlike his Exemplary Fleet Service commendation, were not the kind normally recorded in a standard personnel jacket.

  “What else?”

  “Here.” She pointed to her deskscreen as he leaned on the arm of her chair. “COMTAC training right after assignment to the Nowicki. So they put him on the ship, then send him off to school, then put him back. Not unusual, but not—”

  “This is only what Fleet wants us to see, not what really happened. Not who or what Mather really is.”

  “He was a year ahead of you in the academy. Did you know him?”

  Philip pursed his lips, eyes narrowing. “Not that I remember. And that’s assuming this,” he pointed to her screen, “is even remotely factual. I’m going to take a wild guess and state that Tage put Mather on the Nowicki because of me. I’d been,” and he sighed, shaking his head, “incredibly naive, and with the promise of an admiralty dangled before me, by Tage, I took to confiding in him all the things I saw wrong with the Empire and the Admirals’ Council. He encouraged my ‘refreshing honesty,’ as he used to call it. All my honesty did was provide him with a list of people he could call traitors.”

  “Why put Mather on the Nowicki? The Loviti was your ship.”

  “Jodey Bralford was my XO on the Loviti. And a good friend. Still is. When he took command of the Nowicki, it evidently presented Tage with the perfect opportunity to have all my conversations with Jodey recorded and sent to him, especially after the incident on Marker with Chaz and Sullivan.”

  Incident on Marker? Marker was actually several stations that comprised the main Imperial shipyards in Aldan. “The fire there a few month ago?” she asked, her mind grasping for details.

  “Remember the incident on Corsau years ago when a shipment of jukors … Well, you might not be old enough.” Philip cleared his throat.

  “I remember. A shipment of those mutant beasts escaped, killing civilians, just like on Umoran recently.” Jukors scared the hell out of her. She’d seen one once. She never wanted to see another fanged, razor-winged abomination again.

  “There was a breeding facility for them on Marker. Sullivan and Chaz destroyed it and have been hunting down other breeding labs ever since. Corsau was no accident. Neither was Umoran. Thing is, I helped them get off Marker before station cops could find them. I always wondered if Tage somehow suspected. Once Jodey took over the Nowicki, and with Mather in position as commo, Tage had his proof. Proof of that and everything else since.” He shook his head slowly, his mouth a grim line. “I can see that so goddamned clearly now.”

  “And when the Nowicki came with the Alliance, so did Mather.”

  “The entire Alliance is at risk, and there’s not one goddamned thing I can do about it. Even if I could reach Jodey right now, the damage is already done. Every bit of data that’s on that ship is in Tage’s hands.”

  “Found them!” Sachi Holton bounced into the ready room, breathless. Welford appeared behind her. She glanced over her shoulder at him, then held up two thin rectangular objects, triumph in the wide grin on her face.

  “Archivers,” Rya said softly. Vindication. She was right. Throw my ass off this ship, will you, Guthrie?

  “I want to use one of these deskscreens to open them,” Welford said, pointing to the ready-room table, “but I need to isolate it first. We don’t know what fail-safes this contains. A worm that shuts down this ship in the middle of jump transit would not be a good thing.”

  “I can do that,” Rya said. She pushed back her chair and slipped to the decking before Philip could stop her. She’d helped Welford integrate the deskscreens in this room. She could easily help him un-integrate them.

  That took about five minutes, during which time Philip left the ready room and Sachi Holton crawled under the table to hold the handbeam while Rya poked and tapped according to Welford’s instructions.

  Sachi helped her to her feet. Philip was nowhere to be seen, but Alek Dillon leaned on the back of Welford’s chair, exchanging “yeah, okay” and “no, try that” with him.

  Philip wasn’t on the bridge either. “In his office, I think,” Corvang offered.

  Probably fine-tuning her transfer. Rya sat in one of the chairs at the empty weapons console, fatigue washing over her. Her wristwatch told her it was 2200 hours. Her body told her it was much later than that.

  Too late for her and Philip. All the soppy love scenes she’d ever read where the stalwart hero professes his deep love for the injured heroine were shown to be just what they were—pure fiction—down in the maintenance shop. Evidently the self-indulgence that surfaced in response to impending doom happened only when the doom was Philip’s. When it was her life on the line, it was business as usual. Even a “please don’t die, I might miss you” would have been appreciated.

  Nothing. She was just another crew member to him. She wasn’t even sure he saw her as a woman, because when he’d handed her his shirt in sick bay, he just stood there, as if her being half naked was no concern. So she made sure she was very half naked, because she had to know …

  And he turned away.

  Lose thirty pounds …

  Even Matt never turned away. But then, she didn’t know Matt to ever turn away a woman. Just For Fun Sex was so much easier. Caring hurt.

  She stood, wondering how to make herself useful on a ship with no security systems and more than half the crew at battle stations, when a low epithet that sounded very like Welford caught her attention. She turned on her heel and took the few steps back into the ready room.

  He looked up at her approach. “Perfect timing, Bennton. Where’s Admiral Guthrie?” His tone was grim.

  “Corvang said in his office. But I—”

  “Get on intraship,” Welford ordered, pointing to the panel on the bulkhead. “Get him up here. We have serious problems.”

  Philip didn’t like the sound of Rya’s voice on intraship. He liked even less the looks on Rya’s and Con Welford’s faces when he came into the ready room.

  “Sparks is on his way up, along with Martoni,” Con told him. “I’ll give you the basics right now but I’ll hold up on details until they get here. Close the door, Bennton,” he added.

  Rya reached the palm pad for the corridor door while Philip was still taking the seat next to Con. She closed the bridge door as he studied the few snippets of sentences on Con’s deskscreen. By the time she sat, Philip understood the urgency behind the summons only too well.

  He clenched his fists on the tabletop, when pounding them would have felt far more appropriate. “The Empire will have ships waiting for the Folly at the C-Six gate.”

  “All data indicates that, yes,” Con said. “They know we left Seth, they know about the encounter with the Star-Ripper. They know that we survived Mather’s attempts to disable this ship—the firebomb in the lift, the move in the auxiliary bridge—so that the Imperial strike force tracking you could catch up.”

  “I noticed Mather wasn’t at his console during the fire, but I thought he was helping elsewhere,” Philip said.

  “He was,” Rya put in. “It just wasn’t us he was helping.”

  The corridor door chimed, the command-staff code flashing o
n the deskscreen on Philip’s right and evidently on Rya’s too, because she stood. But not without first putting her hand on the Carver. Absently, he noticed she still wore his shirt. She’d tucked it in her pants, but it was large for her and bloused out around her waist. Another time he might have found that amusing, maybe even endearing. But life had turned serious and bordered on dire.

  She hit the palm pad. Sparks came in, followed by a frowning Martoni.

  “It looks like none of us is going to get any sleep tonight,” Sparks said, swiveling a chair around.

  Philip waited for the doors to close. “Tell them.”

  “We found the archivers Mather used,” Con said. “Summaries he made of his orders and his reports. The Empire not only knows everything that happened up until we hit the gate, it will be waiting for us when we exit.”

  There was a tight silence, full of anguish and frustration.

  “How many ships?” Philip asked. The brief sections of transcribed text he viewed didn’t show that data.

  “He wasn’t given that information, or if he was, he didn’t note it,” Con answered. “But we won’t be far from the Baris border. You’d know better than I would what ships the Empire has been keeping at Starport Six or Talgarrath.”

  Philip did, and it wasn’t an encouraging summation. “What we—what they’ve kept there may not be what’s there now. But it’s not unlikely we could face the Drey, the Masting, or even the Loviti, in addition to whatever this strike force is Mather talks about. The plain fact is, all we have are short-range laser banks. We’d have a chance against some P-33s. As long as they weren’t leading a pair of cruisers.” Maybe.

  “So we abort out of jump before the gate.” Martoni splayed one hand out, looking from Con to Sparks. “They won’t know—”

  “You ever been part of an aborted jump, boy?” Sparks asked. “Aborting a jump takes precise, defined data from instruments this ship no longer has. This ain’t no captain’s pinnace or some tricked-out Imperial fighter. This is an eight-hundred- fifty-ton fruit hauler. Forget what she used to be—and even when she was what she used to be, I don’t know if I’d have wanted to chance an aborted jump in her. She predates the technology that made those things only slightly less than fatal.”

  “Imperial ships at exit are completely fatal,” Philip said, understanding Sparks’s objections but, like Martoni, wanting options. Needing options. “Is there any chance—”

  “Skipper, I’d like nothing more than to make you happy. Especially right now, given all you’ve been through here. I’m sorry. I can’t make you happy.”

  He could hear it in Sparks’s voice. His miracle worker had run out of miracles. Philip turned back to Con. “What else is in those archivers? Give us everything, no matter how insignificant. There has to be something we can use.”

  Con sighed. “The Empire doesn’t know Mather’s dead. They don’t know that we know they’ll be waiting at gate exit. Other than that … ”

  The XO went through the data on both archivers in chronological order. The first started just before Mather left the Nowicki with Adney and her team. If they lived through this, Philip thought, he’d have to tell Jodey to strip Mather’s cabin—hell, strip down the whole ship. There might be other archivers and more data the Alliance could use.

  If they lived through this—no. He’d add that to the encrypted message to Jodey, send it three different ways as soon as they exited the gate. One of the messages would make it. Even if Philip didn’t.

  But it wasn’t just his own mortality on the horizon. It was his officers, his crew. It was Sparks coming out of retirement. It was Corvang, who’d studied everything the Great Guthrie ever wrote. It was Con Welford, who deserved better than an old fool for a CO.

  And it was Rya.

  He couldn’t let thoughts of her surface, not now. There was too much to do, too much at stake. But, dear God and sweet stars above, there was Rya.

  It wasn’t that he doubted her abilities to handle this, not as an officer. She was a Bennton; every hour he spent with her, he saw more of Cory’s resolve, his dedication. But there was also Rya the woman who fought by his side on Kirro Station, who saved his life on the shuttle, who should be in sick bay and wasn’t.

  He didn’t doubt her. He doubted himself. And that scared the hell out of him.

  “One thing I noticed in going over Mather’s notes again,” Con said, “are some of the technical terms he uses. We thought of him as Commo. I think he was more than that.”

  “He had ship’s primaries and intended to run the ship himself from the auxiliary bridge,” Rya pointed out.

  “For a short time,” Martoni said.

  “He still would have to have more knowledge for that than what’s reflected in his records,” Rya said.

  “It’s as if he was purposely kept at third-shift commo up until now so no one would notice him,” Philip put in. “And in jump transit, no one would care if he wasn’t at his post. He wouldn’t be expected to be, yet as command staff, he had access to everything.”

  Rya looked at him. “We need to track down everything he had access to.”

  “The entire ship,” Con said with a broad wave of his hand. “The admiral said it. Mather was command staff. He had codes. He had the authority.”

  Philip nodded. “And he was one of the first on board, along with you, Adney, and Corvang. Those first few days, he had total access to this ship. And very few eyes watching him.”

  “What are you saying?” Con regarded Philip with narrowed eyes.

  “I’m saying we’ve had problems with this ship that we wrote off because she’s a Stryker-class bucket. What if the problems aren’t the ship but Mather?”

  “He knew enough about the communications system to make it malfunction,” Rya said.

  “That was his job.” Martoni leaned forward. “He would know those things.”

  “But what if he knew more?” Philip persisted.

  “He could have known how to build a Stryker from the inside out.” Sparks leaned back in his chair, lips pursed. He angled toward Philip. “But, Skipper, that’s not going to give us the ability to do an aborted jump. You can alter what’s here. You can’t add what isn’t.”

  Philip stood, leaning his fists on the table. “We have a little more than one and a half shipdays before we have to face the inevitable on the other side of that jumpgate. Constantine, Sparks, get your best technical people together. If we can’t do the impossible, then we need to at least be able to do the unexpected.” He took in the faces around the table, seeing rumpled uniforms and shadows under eyes. “Priority right now is getting intraship fully functional and getting all deskscreens linked.”

  “On it,” Martoni and Con said together.

  “Then get a few hours’ sleep—working exhausted won’t help. Next meeting is 0630, this room. Dismissed.

  “Oh, and Con,” he added as Sparks and Martoni rose, “if the data on those archivers is clean, shoot me over a copy of everything once deskscreens are linked. Fresh eyes never hurt.”

  If he was going to die, he damned well wanted to understand the man who’d brought him to that point before he did so.

  Philip couldn’t sleep. He’d stared at the data Con sent for over an hour, his gut clenching, his head pounding, anger clashing with determination. He would not let the Imperials take this ship. There was an answer here somewhere. There had to be.

  But his eyesight was also blurring. He’d told his command staff not to work to exhaustion. Listen to your own advice, Guthrie.

  So he’d trudged, cane in hand, across his main salon and collapsed onto his bed. He left his discarded clothes in a very un-Philip- Guthrie-like pile on the decking next to the bed. Finally living up to your nickname, eh, Scruffy?

  At one point the cat pattered in and out. At one point the scent of oranges drifted in, then disappeared. His body was exhausted. His mind ached. His heart was torn to pieces.

  Sparks’s words haunted him. Darius Tage didn’t hesitate to
threaten Chaz’s life to get at you.

  His family was still in the Empire. His parents’ estate was on Sylvadae. Guthrie Global Systems headquarters were there as well, and on Garno, where his youngest brother, Devin, lived. Like Philip, Dev was unmarried. But that didn’t mean there weren’t lots of other Guthries out there. They were all civilians. Potential targets.

  Philip was the only Guthrie who’d veered away from three centuries of Guthrie Global money and followed his heart into the military

  His older brother, Jonathan—Jonathan Macy Guthrie II—had three children: Jonathan Macy Guthrie III, who’d earned the nickname Trippy because he was the third, the triple. First year at college; a smart and personable young man with a damned good hook shot. Trip’s sister, Thana, was sixteen. Max was twelve. And those were just Jonathan’s and Marguerite’s children.

  Ethan, forty-one, and his wife, Hannah, had four children: Glynnis, a bit younger than Thana, the twins, Charity Joy and Cherilyn Faith, and little four-year- old Marcus.

  Throw in his parents, J. M. and Valerie, who were in their late seventies, and that was enough—more than enough—for Tage’s purposes. More than enough for a man who had no qualms about “civilian casualties.” More than enough for a man who sent ImpSec assassins after the remaining Loviti officers on Corsau Station.

  The Folly could not survive a firefight with an Imperial cruiser, but Philip had no reason to believe any personal surrender on his part would guarantee the lives of his officers and crew. It was a death sentence either way, quite frankly.

  So he would go down fighting.

  “Philip.”

  He jerked awake, though he hadn’t been asleep, just lying there with one arm thrown over his eyes. But if he wasn’t asleep, why didn’t he hear—

  “Rya?” He knew her voice immediately, and more than that he knew the outline of her form—all curves and softness, with the slight bulk of the Carver on her hip. The dim decklights from the lav opposite his bedroom limned her softly. “What’s wrong?”

  He rose up on his elbows, the sheet sliding down his chest.

  “Lights, low,” she ordered, her voice barely more than a whisper. A diffuse glow filled his room, just enough so that she wasn’t completely in shadow. She took two steps—hesitantly—toward his bed.