by Nate Johnson
He stopped and looked down at her for a long moment, then nodded and left her alone.
As soon as he exited, she grabbed the sink and held on for a long minute as she pulled herself back together. At last, taking a deep breath, she focused on removing the blood from his shirt.
It was the least she could do, she thought, as she rubbed the fabric under the rushing cold water from the faucet. Somehow, she knew that she would never be able to repay this man for all that he had done for her. And all without any expectation of being paid. He did it because his sense of honor demanded it of him.
This had been the reason she had demanded that captain White select him. She knew that she could trust that sense of honor to guide Logan in all things.
Her mind wandered to her father and the men he dealt with. They wouldn’t know honor if it slapped them upside the head. She thought of the meetings she had attended as her father’s secretary. The duplicitous turns of phrase, the betrayals, the outright lies, all in the service of their own agendas.
This man was different, she realized. As she had told captain White, he couldn’t be bought nor intimidated.
Once she had his shirt as clean as it was going to get, she hung it around one of the sinks. Taking a deep breath, she stepped back out into the main room to join Logan.
He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall examining her work as a nurse.
“Good job,” he said with a satisfied nod.
The simple compliment made her heart swell. Sighing, she slid down the wall to sit next to him and stared off into the shadowy room.
“What next?” she asked.
Logan chuckled. “We’ll stay here tonight. Give them an opportunity to completely lose us, then we will try again in the morning.”
Suddenly, she thought of them spending the night together, alone, in this room. The thought made her heart race, not so much with fear, but with a fluttery feeling of the unknown.
Her stomach rumbled as she realized they’d go without dinner. At least they had water, she thought.
He laughed at the sound her stomach made, “Don’t worry,” he said. “Missing one meal won’t kill you. It is the tenth or twelfth when things start getting bad.
His answer surprised her. What did she know about this man? Really, not that much, she realized. Their time together seemed to always be filled with danger and peril. Never really any time to learn about each other.
“How old are you Logan?” she asked suddenly before she could stop herself.
He glanced over at her for a moment, his brow narrowing, then he slightly shrugged and said, “Twenty-Five. You?”
“Twenty-Three,” she answered, as her mind frantically tried to think of the next question. It had to be something innocuous, something that wouldn’t shut him down. She was relatively sure that he was not the kind of man that liked talking about himself. The strong-silent type.
“Where are you from?” she asked. “Before the Navy, that is.”
He froze as a hidden pain flashed behind his eyes. Kaylee held her breath. Had she asked the wrong thing?
He looked at her for a long moment as if trying to decide to tell her or not. Finally, one word escaped his lips.
“Corona,” he said as if that was all he needed to say.
Kaylee gasped as she worked out the math. It couldn’t be possible. She didn’t think she had ever met a survivor of Corona.
“That means ...”
He slowly nodded, confirming her worst fears. “Yes, I was twelve when the plague hit.”
She remained silent, afraid to move, as every part of her soul quietly begged to know more.
He turned away from her to look off into the distance.
“In three days, everyone under ten years old, and everyone over eighteen was dead. Two hundred and forty-three thousand people, including my parents, and my little brother.”
Kaylee’s heart broke as her hand started to reach out to comfort him, but she held back. Not yet, she realized. This man didn’t want her comfort, not yet. He needed to tell his story first. She wondered if he had ever told anyone.
Holding her breath, she waited for him to continue.
“I’ve got to give the empire credit. When they are terrified they move pretty fast. Within a week the entire city was quarantined. Shut down tighter than a nun’s ... a nun’s purse. First barbwire, then mine fields, and finally a ten-foot iron wall. Nothing in, nothing out.
“And there we were, kids, surrounded by bodies and trying to figure out what had happened and why we had survived.”
Kaylee studied his face, she could see the pain the memories were bringing him, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to stop. What must it have been like? she wondered. What would she have done?
“The easy food lasted a couple of weeks. The stuff we had in the house. But after that, it was scavenging. God, the smell, you have no idea. A dead person smells different than a dead animal. Sweeter, somehow, more pungent.”
Her insides curled up at his words and the pain in his eyes.
“They never told us,” she said. “I remember how worried my father was. But everything was kept quiet.”
He laughed. “Yeah, for us too. About a year in, someone figured out we were all going to starve to death or kill each other for what little food remained. So they started dropping in food. Of course, that only meant the fighting was centered around the care packages.”
She looked at him, what had his life been like? Had he had to fight to eat? Had he killed anyone? For some reason, she thought that he had. More than once.
He caught her looking at him. It felt as if he were reading her mind. He shrugged in answer to her silent question. “You’d be surprised what you will do if your stomach gets empty enough.”
“Did you have friends? People who could help?” she asked.
He shook his head, “At first, but they died. The younger they were, the sooner they died. I was probably one of the few twelve-year-olds to make it.” His face grew pale as he remembered. “I learned not to get too close to people. It just hurt too much when they died.”
Her heart broke once again. Torn in part at his words.
“It took them almost two years to figure it out. Why we had lived. A booster shot.”
She frowned, unable to understand what he was saying.
“Everyone gets a second Nano booster shot on their tenth birthday. It gets them ready for puberty. The Nano’s have to be different to handle all the changes in the body.”
Kaylee nodded, she remembered getting hers. It was a rite of passage. Confirmation that you weren’t a little kid anymore.
“Well, it seems, the booster shot wasn’t susceptible to the virus. The original dose when we were born, and the one people got when they turned eighteen, were both susceptible. Therefore they died, and we didn’t.”
Kaylee froze at the casualness of his words, it was as if he were talking about how some people got blue balloons and others got red at a birthday party. Yet she knew in her heart that he was being torn up inside.
“Once they had it figured out, they could boost the soldiers and open up the city. And once the empire had been inoculated, the planet.”
She slowly nodded as she remembered that part of the story.
What could she say, how could she make him feel better. Every part of her soul wanted to erase his pain, yet she knew in her very heart that it would never be possible.
“The things is,” he said, “we didn’t have the virus. Our Nano’s killed it. It was all a waste. There was no reason we had to stay behind those walls.”
His agony was so obvious that it pulled at her heart.
Seeing her look of concern he shrugged his wide shoulders.
“As you can imagine. When the authorities came back in. We weren’t exactly super compliant.” He laughed. “I remember when they opened up the schools. They were surprised when we all didn’t show up, scrubbed and ready to learn. What they didn’t know was that the thought of b
eing in a room with a bunch of other people scared the hell out of us.”
“Besides,” he continued, “the last thing we were going to do was what some adult told us to do. We’d been on our own for two years.”
“I can’t imagine what it was like,” she said softly, finally resting her hand on his arm to let him know she was there if he needed her.
He glanced down at her hand and smiled weakly.
They sat like that for several minutes, quietly sharing a silent moment.
Once she felt the moment had passed, she asked, “How did you end up in the Navy?”
He laughed and smiled with a smile that actually reached his eyes.
“I didn’t have much of a choice,” he said. “As you can imagine, I was a little wild. A heathen, someone once said. I got brought before a judge on more than one occasion. Nothing serious, petty theft, truancy, breaking and entering, that kind of thing.”
“That’s not serious?” she asked, her eyebrows rising to her hairline.
He laughed, “I guess it is all perspective. Anyway, the last time, the judge said she had enough. That she’d given me plenty of chances to straighten up. But that I was a lost cause. But because I had passed my school tests, enough to graduate, she said I had a choice, three years in jail or the Imperial Navy.”
“I thought you said you didn’t go back to school,” she asked.
“I didn’t,” he said with a slight smirk, “I just took the tests to get them off my back. Don’t forget, I had two years with no distractions, except finding food. Once that was done, I had a ton of free time on my hands and plenty of books. The libraries were my home away from home.”
“So, you passed your exams, with scores high enough to get into the Navy, all without going to the last five years of school?”
He shrugged his shoulders again as it were no big deal.
“Anyway, of course, I took the Navy. It turned out to be one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. If not for the Navy, I never would have known the joy of being shot at by pirates.”
The twinkle in his eyes let her know that he was teasing.
She slowly shook her head. What this man had gone through was truly remarkable. To think, when she was ten, her father had been an ambassador on Azortha, the planet next in line to Corona. She remembered the sadness that had fallen over the embassy when they learned about what had happened to the people stationed at the Corona consulate. She remembered how her father had been so busy.
She, on the other hand, had been oblivious to what was going on. She had her three tutors and a house full of servants. All, while this boy was scrambling through the ruins of Corona, fighting to stay alive.
And yet, here they were, together in an abandoned room on Montlake. The unpredictability of life never stopped amazing her.
Chapter Seven
Lieutenant Commander Bob White rubbed his temple as he tried to push a massive headache out of his head.
“Are you sure?” he asked Lieutenant Stevens.
“Yes, Sir,” the young officer replied. “Miller wasn’t at morning muster. I asked Chief Bowen to check the entire ship. No one has seen him. He hasn’t returned.”
“Damn,” the skipper muttered.
“Jonesy did mention that he stopped by a tavern that Miller usually goes to. Jonesy said that a barmaid told him that Miller and a young woman ran through the place and out the back. And that two men were chasing them.”
“Damn," the skipper said again as his stomach turned over.
“Our two watchers are still on the dock, Sir,” Stevens said. “They followed the crew for a short time then returned to watch us. They must have seen through Jonesy’s act.”
Taking a deep breath, the skipper fought to control the rising worry growing inside of him. Miller should have been back last night. The man wouldn’t have taken off on liberty without checking back in and letting them know that Miss Williams had been delivered safely.
Even if he had enjoyed a night on the town. Miller knew perfectly well that Navy regulations required the men to return for muster at eight each morning. They might be hung over and barely able to stand. But they’d be there.
“Okay, lieutenant. Go ahead and grant liberty at nine,” Lieutenant Commander White said. “Tell the crew to keep a lookout for Miller and let us know if they learn anything.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,”
The comm unit on the captain’s desk buzzed.
“Yes?” he answered as he held up a hand to stop the young lieutenant from leaving.
“Sir, it’s Peterson, on the quarterdeck.”
“Yes?” the skipper replied.
“Sir, I have a captain Townsend here, from the Embassy. He would like to see you.”
The skipper’s stomach tightened into a tight ball. This could not be good.
“Have someone bring him to my stateroom.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” the watch-stander replied.
Lieutenant Stevens raised an eyebrow in question.
“I don’t know,” the beacon tender’s captain said. “But I fear we are going to find out.”
Only a minute later, there was a sharp rap on his stateroom door. Lieutenant Commander White stood, running a hand down his uniform, and said, “Enter.”
A tall, thin, naval captain, with four gold bars on his lower sleeve, entered the cabin. His rock-steady stare looked like it could halt a Valdorian elephant in its tracks.
“White,” the man said.
“Captain Townsend,” the skipper replied. He had never particularly liked the embassy attaché here in Montlake. The man could be rather pompous and didn’t particularly care for beacon tenders. He had always felt as if the captain looked down on him and his ship whenever they pulled into Montlake.
“This is my first officer, Lieutenant Stevens,” the skipper said as way of introductions.
The senior captain merely nodded and said, “I have received orders. You should be getting them at this moment. You are to get underway immediately and return to your home port on Siska.”
“What?” the skipper blurted out before he could stop himself.
Ignoring the look of displeasure on the senior captain’s face, he scrambled to his screen and pulled up the orders.
“You will see that there is to be no delay. I checked, you have the necessary stores, fuel, etc.” the captain said. “You are to depart immediately.
“But Sir ...”
“There will be no delay. In fact, I have received separate instructions that I am to stand on the dock and make sure you leave immediately.” Obviously, the idea of being tasked with such a menial job was extremely upsetting to the senior captain.
“But Sir ...”
The senior captain shook his head. “Really, White, I don’t know what you did, or who you angered. But these orders are not to be ignored. They come from the highest authority.”
“Sir,” the skipper said, “I have a crewman still ashore.”
“What?” the senior captain said. “He missed morning muster.” The look of disdain on the captain’s face let him know what he thought of the discipline of his crew. In fact, it confirmed the belief that the beacon tender crews were the least disciplined spacers in the fleet.
“Sir,” the skipper said, as he squared his shoulders, “Petty Officer Miller was escorting Miss Williams to the Embassy. Can you tell me if they arrived?”
The senior captain’s brow furrowed in anger. “I thought you were instructed not to provide an escort for Miss Williams.”
“Sir, the orders stated we couldn’t provide an armed escort. Miller was on his liberty time. Unarmed. I tasked him to go with Miss Williams for her own safety. This is Montlake after all.”
“Why wasn’t I informed?” the senior captain said.
The skipper shrugged his shoulders, he really didn’t like this man. “Sir, I take it they didn’t arrive?”
“No, they didn’t arrive,” the senior captain said.
“I imagine her father is rather
upset,” the skipper said as he watched the senior captain. Something wasn’t right. This entire evolution stunk to high heaven.
Captain Townsend shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter, White. Your orders are explicit. You are to return to Siska immediately. You will do so.”
“And Petty Officer Miller?” the skipper asked.
“I am sure he will show up soon. When he does, I will send him out on the next transport.” The senior captain scoffed. “As slow as your vessel is, he might very well be there waiting for you when you get home.”
Lieutenant Commander White gritted his teeth and didn’t reply as his mind frantically searched for a way out. The thought of leaving Miller behind went against everything he knew or believed in. But orders were orders, and he couldn’t figure a way out of these.
Sighing, the skipper turned to his first officer. “Lieutenant Stevens. Have the crew make preparations for getting underway.”
The young officer’s face drained of all color, but at least he had the sense to keep his opinions to himself
“Aye, aye, Sir,” the young lieutenant said as he came to attention.
The skipper shook his head, Where was Miller? And why hadn’t he returned?
“And Stevens,” the skipper said as he looked directly at Captain Townsend, “please ensure the ships logs reflect that Petty Officer Miller was ashore carrying out an order given by me. And that he is not missing movement. But that because of factors beyond his control. He was left behind. Also have the ship's log reflect that Captain Townsend, the attaché here on Montlake has assumed the responsibility for making sure that Petty Officer Miller is safely returned to us on Siska.
The young lieutenant glanced between the two men. Shook his head and said, “Aye, aye, Sir. I will make sure of it.”
.o0o.
Logan looked down at the top of Kaylee’s head as it rested on his shoulder. His good arm was wrapped around her, and his jacket covered them both.
It had been a long night. The kind of night that made a man think of his past and of his future.
He still couldn’t believe that he had told her about Corona. But it had seemed to just bubble out of him.
