Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  His daughter squinted against the increased brightness, but not enough to hide her eyes’ glazed, reddish discoloration. As he continued to glare at her, unblinking, a thin coat of sweat began to appear, first on her forehead and then on her upper lip.

  Any moment now.

  Her statue-like posture began to falter as she struggled to hold the air in her lungs. She licked and then tightly pursed her quivering lips. She swallowed. She clenched her fists.

  Any second now.

  Finally, after almost two whole minutes, Heather let it go and seemed almost to deflate, dropping her gaze to the floor as a cloud of gray-green smoke poured from her mouth and nose and slowly drifted toward the filter vents. No doubt feeling a little dizzy, she leaned back against the sink.

  Hansen unfolded his arms and approached her, but she stepped away, without taking her eyes off the floor. He peered into the sink and saw the remains of a single, mostly smoked hand-rolled cigarette floating in about an inch of water. He stared at it for several seconds, then turned to his daughter.

  “Look at me, Heather,” he demanded. Although he was sure she didn’t want to, he knew that at that moment she wouldn’t dare defy him.

  She looked up, hesitantly but immediately, and gazed at him with genuine fear in her unfocused eyes. “You’ve certainly gotten yourself into more than your fair share of trouble over the years, Heather,” her father began, speaking very calmly, “but I always thought you were smarter than this. I am very, very...disappointed in you.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks as she dropped her gaze back to the floor. ‘Disappointed’ was a word he hadn’t used with her in several years, despite all the trouble she’d gotten into. The last time he had used it, in fact, it had nearly broken her heart.

  “Perhaps it would be best for the both of us if I sent you back to Westcott for the year,” he added, reminding her of the one place he knew she never wanted to go back to.

  The Westcott Boarding School for Troubled Teens, New Haven, Connecticut. He’d sent her there for most of her eighth grade year after she and some of her friends—some of her former friends, now—had formed a sort of gang at Mandela Middle School and started beating up and stealing from their fellow students. She had absolutely hated the place and had gone out of her way to try to become a disciplinary problem there, hoping to get herself kicked out. But after about six months, once she’d finally realized that that wasn’t going to work, she’d straightened up and quickly become a model student. The change in her had been so pronounced in fact, that the Dean of the school, convinced that she had truly learned her lesson and changed her ways, had contacted the admiral and recommended that he withdraw her early, take her home, and re-enroll her in her regular school for the rest of the semester. He had done so, and for the next several months her behavior had been exemplary. Unfortunately, by the time she started ninth grade, she’d also started slipping back into her old ways.

  Threatening to send her back to Westcott had been his absolute last resort. If she called his bluff...

  But she didn’t. Instead, she looked up at him, her eyes filled with horror and rivers of tears flowing down over her cheeks, then ran to him and grabbed the front of his shirt. “No, Daddy, don’t!” she pleaded desperately. “Don’t ever send me back to that place! Please!” She buried her face in his chest and sobbed.

  “I’m sorry, Heather, but I don’t know what else to do with you,” he told her matter-of-factly, fighting the fatherly urge to embrace her and hiding the fact that her tearful pleas were nearly tearing his heart out.

  “Please don’t send me back there again!” she continued pleading. “I hate it there! All my friends are up here! You’re up here! I don’t have anybody down there!”

  “That’s not my problem, Heather,” he responded coldly, trying hard to sound unmoved by her pleas. “I can’t have you up here with me anymore if you’re going to keep breaking the law and getting into trouble.”

  “I’ll stop,” she proclaimed, looking up at him. “I promise, Daddy. I won’t break any more laws, I swear. I won’t get in any more trouble, ever again. Just don’t send me away to boarding school again, please!”

  Daddy. The one word in the entire English language that she could use on him like a blunt instrument to weaken his resolve, and he knew that she knew that as well as he did. He gazed down at her for a moment, then finally lost the battle and wrapped his arms lovingly around her and sighed. Surrendering again. But she was his daughter. His only child. His flesh and blood. How could he possibly not give in to her desperate, tearful pleas?

  “All right,” he acquiesced. “We’ll give it one more try, and I do mean one more. But if you get into trouble again...”

  “I won’t, Daddy. I promise.”

  “All right. But you are going to be punished for this. And first thing Monday morning we’re taking whatever stash you’ve got in your room and turning it over to the Civil Security’s narcotics agents. You’re going to tell them everything you know about your dealer and anything else you might know about drug trafficking on this station. Understood?”

  “Understood.” She looked up at him, her red, glassy, unfocused eyes like those of an innocent puppy, albeit a puppy high on narcotics. “I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you, too, Princess.”

  Chapter 9

  Three Days Later

  Earth Standard Date: Tuesday, 20 July 2190

  Apparently having reached her wits end, Doctor Forrest had called up to the bridge a few minutes ago and urgently requested Commander Rawlins’ presence. As marched purposefully through the wide central corridor on his way to Medbay, his pounding heart, which he was starting to feel in his head as well as in his chest, served to remind him of just how much he was not looking forward to confronting the captain, regardless of the fact that he’d had those few minutes to prepare himself for the inevitable showdown. Not when he was going to have to take the doctor’s side against her.

  Captain Suja Bhatnagar might have been a little on the petite side physically, but like most of her peers, at least those whom Rawlins had had the opportunity to meet over the years, she exuded an almost larger than life presence wherever she went. There was just something about being a starship captain that filled a person with a kind of impenetrable self-confidence. Or, perhaps it was that abundance of self-confidence that enabled a person to achieve that lofty position in the first place. Either way, it had the effect of encouraging others to tuck tail and run whenever they found themselves in opposition, and unfortunately for Rawlins that was exactly where he was about to find himself.

  Her injuries had turned out to be much more serious than the medical technicians who’d carted her off the bridge had realized. According to Doctor Forrest, who’d been kind enough to put it into layman’s terms for him so he could actually understand what she was talking about, not only had the captain broken her right pelvic bone, she’d also cracked the back of her skull and severely bruised her brain. That being said, the doctor had considered her to be lucky, further explaining that if she had hit her head much harder, she might well have broken her skull clean through and suffered much more severe or perhaps even immediately fatal trauma to her brain.

  As it was, she’d suffered internal bleeding and had required immediate emergency surgery to relieve the slowly but steadily increasing pressure on her brain. She’d remained unconscious for the next two days and Rawlins had been worried sick, despite the fact that Forrest had assured him that the prolonged bed rest was the absolute best thing for her. But earlier this morning, when she finally did wake up, Bhatnagar had wanted no part of any prolonged rest, bed or otherwise. Doctor Forrest had always accused starship captains of being the worst kind of patients, and now Rawlins had heard the proof of that assertion. Not yet able to stand up on her own or even to focus clearly on her surroundings, the captain had nonetheless demanded that she be released from Medbay and returned to duty status immediately. Her ship was still in a c
ombat zone, badly damaged and at great risk, and that was all she cared about.

  Naturally, Doctor Forrest had refused to comply with that demand, after which the captain had threatened to have her arrested for disobeying a direct order. While that order hadn’t carried any real weight, given the fact that the doctor’s professional medical judgment rightfully overruled it, it had set the stage for an ugly confrontation that had only ended when Forrest and two of her staff held the struggling captain down on her bed—not too difficult a task in itself, considering her weakened state—and sedated her. Strictly in order to prevent her from further injuring herself, Forrest had later explained to the Executive Officer.

  What a circus that had been, Rawlins reflected as he paused just short of the Medbay doors’ sensor range. And with the captain already fuming over that, this confrontation promised to be even worse.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to calm his pounding heart, never more thankful than he was at that very moment that the responsibility for all medical decisions lay squarely on Doctor Forrest’s shoulders rather than on his own. Then, deciding that he was as ready as he was ever going to be, he stepped forward.

  “...right now, Doctor!” he heard the captain shouting vehemently as the doors parted and he stepped inside. “That is a direct order!”

  “Not unless you give me your word that you’ll stay put, Captain!” he then heard Doctor Forrest reply just as firmly, but much less audibly by comparison as he made his way through the outer offices and into the Intensive Care ward. The light blue-green privacy curtain had been pulled around the captain’s bed, shielding it from view, despite the fact that the rest of the ward was empty.

  “Doctor Forrest?” he called to announce his presence as he approached.

  “Thank God!” she exclaimed. “Come in, Commander, please!”

  Rawlins swept the curtain aside to find the doctor standing over and glaring down at the captain, her lips pursed with stubborn determination and her arms folded defiantly across her chest. Upon seeing him, Bhatnagar quickly pulled her blankets to her chin and held them there as he stepped in.

  “Captain,” he greeted his commanding officer with a nod, glancing briefly at the freshly changed bandages wrapped around her head and wondering again if the doctor had been forced to shave off all that beautiful black hair.

  With her jaw clenched, her nostrils flared, and her lips pursed even tighter than the doctor’s, Bhatnagar appeared as though she might explode at any moment, and when she looked away and didn’t answer, Rawlins looked at the doctor and calmly asked, “What’s going on here, Doctor?”

  Forrest looked his way and drew a breath to answer, but the enraged captain beat her to the punch. “Commander Rawlins, it’s about time you got here!” she barked, glaring at him through angry, dark eyes like lethal lasers. “Doctor Forrest is under arrest for disobeying a direct order! You will call the Security Forces and have her taken to the brig immediately!”

  Rawlins gazed at her, taken aback. He’d seen her upset before, but never so furious at one of her officers as she seemed to be now. “Exactly what order has she disobeyed, Captain?” he asked, acting as though he might be prepared to comply if the doctor’s alleged disobedience warranted it. No point in making her mad at him, too.

  “The order to give me something to wear!”

  For the first time since he walked in, Rawlins noticed that the captain’s shoulders were as bare as her arms. “You mean...”

  “Yes! I mean I’m completely naked! She knocked me out again and stripped me bare!”

  Rawlins looked at the doctor, but he didn’t have to ask.

  “It’s not like I slugged her across the jaw, Commander,” Forrest explained. “I gave her another sedative. It was either that or strap her down like some kind of violent mental case.”

  When Rawlins kept staring at her without saying anything, she became defensive and added, “She tried to sneak out of here twice today, which, by the way...” she pointed out as she looked down at the captain again, “is a willful violation of the order I gave her to stay here and not try to get up!” She turned her eyes back to Rawlins again and continued, “My authority as the chief medical officer aboard this ship...”

  “I’m aware of your authority, Lieutenant Commander,” Rawlins assured her, reminding her at the same time that her rank was subordinate to his own—sort of an unspoken message meant to caution her against overstepping her bounds. “And you, I trust, are just as aware of the captain’s religious beliefs?”

  “Thank you, Commander,” Bhatnagar interjected.

  “Of course I am, sir,” Forrest responded more calmly, “and I’ve already briefed my staff. Only my women are providing the captain’s care. I’m not even allowing the men to step inside the curtain to see if she needs anything.”

  “Stop talking about me like I’m not here, both of you,” Bhatnagar insisted. “Commander Rawlins, I gave you an order. You will call the Security Forces and you will have Doctor Forrest taken into custody and confined to the brig immediately!”

  Rawlins gazed down at his commanding officer. This was it—the moment when he had to back the doctor’s actions against the captain’s orders. The moment he’d been dreading for the last several hours. “Unfortunately, Captain, Doctor Forrest’s authority takes precedence over yours in this matter, and you know it,” he said. “If she says you’re not ready to be released, then there’s nothing I or anyone else can do about it.”

  “Traitor,” she responded more calmly than he’d expected her to, her tone of voice more conceding than accusatory. Her glare, however, could have burned right through his head.

  “But, at the same time,” he continued, looking at Forrest again, “you need to respect the captain’s beliefs and give her something to wear, Doctor. And I mean right now, even if you have banned the men from looking in on her.”

  “She’ll just try to sneak out again, Commander,” Forrest warned, shaking her head. “I will not allow her to further aggravate her injuries,” She looked at the captain, “or her doctor.”

  “Why, you insubordinate...”

  Rawlins sighed, then looked down at the captain once more. “Captain Bhatnagar,” he began. Then, when she looked up at him, he looked her right in the eye and said, “Under her authority as the ship’s C-M-O, Doctor Forrest has ordered you to stay in Medbay and remain in bed until such time as she determines you are healthy enough to be released. That is a lawful medical order, Captain, and if you violate it I will have no choice but to relieve you of your command, place you under arrest, and return you to Medbay under a twenty-four hour guard...for the good of the ship, as well as for your own. Do I make myself clear, Captain?”

  For a moment Bhatnagar only stared back at him, expressionless. Then her eyes narrowed as an angry, almost evil smirk slowly appeared on her lips. “I’ll get you for this, you mutinous son-of-a-bitch,” she warned.

  Rawlins drew a deep breath and recoiled, then exhaled slowly, this time to hold his own temper in check. Then he pointed out to her, “The fact that you would even say such a thing, Captain, especially to me, tells me that Doctor Forrest is absolutely right to keep you here.” Then, to the doctor, he said, “At least give her back her underclothes, Doctor. Then come see me in your office.”

  “Her underclothes won’t fit over the hip brace I put her in, and that cannot come off for some weeks yet,” Forrest informed him.

  “Then come up with something else, and give her a medical smock to go over it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Forrest acquiesced, clearly still not in agreement.

  Rawlins concluded with, “Get some rest, Captain.” Then he turned to leave.

  “Commander Rawlins,” Bhatnagar beckoned, suddenly much more calm than she had been. Once he turned back to her, she asked, “What’s our status?”

  Suddenly all business? So be it. If it kept her in Medbay and out of trouble, Rawlins had no problem at all filling her in. After all, despite her hostile attitude, the Vict
ory was still her ship, whether she was presently sitting in command or not.

  “Still no further enemy contact since that lone battlecruiser the other day,” he began. “We made brief contact with the jumpstation afterwards. They’ll have a pair of emergency jump nacelles rigged and standing by for on-the-go installation when we get there, which should be any minute now.” He started to turn away again, but then hesitated and, hoping to set her mind at ease once and for all, added, “We’re well on our way home, Captain. There really is no reason for you to worry about anything at this point. Please, just stay here and rest. Give yourself time to heal.”

  She gazed silently at him for a moment, then said, “Only if you promise to keep me informed of any changes.”

  “You have my word on it, Captain.” And with that, he left her side and went to Doctor Forrest’s office to wait.

  When the doctor arrived a few minutes later, she resumed their conversation by pointing out what to Rawlins couldn’t have been more obvious. “The captain isn’t herself.”

  Rawlins snickered. “She called me a mutinous son-of-a-bitch, Doctor,” he reminded her. “I’d say ‘isn’t herself’ qualifies as the understatement of the century.” But then he qualified his agreement by adding, “Although, you and your staff did...strip her...of her dignity, Doctor. As the ship’s captain, that kind of personal vulnerability isn’t something she wants anyone to see in her, under any circumstances.”

  “Captain or not, she’s still a human being, Commander. It was necessary.”

  “Be that as it may, I wish you’d called me first. If I’d had the opportunity to present that action to her as one possible way of enforcing your order, maybe she would’ve complied before you actually had to do it.”

  When it became clear to him that Doctor Forrest had nothing more to say on the subject, he shifted gears and asked, “Any idea why she’s acting the way she is?”

  “The brain is a funny thing, Commander,” she pointed out. “Ask me why her vision was so out of whack when she first woke up and I’ll tell you it was because she took a severe blow to the back of her head that affected her vision centers. But ask me why her core personality seems to have changed? Why she’s suddenly become so much more aggressive?” She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “I can isolate the specific area of the brain and identify any physical damage, but to explain why she’s acting the way she is? That’s not so easy.”