by Lyn Gala
Tom didn’t know why Ramsay wanted to torture him now when it didn’t matter, but there wasn’t much he could do to stop him. He looked up and Da’shay was standing beside the Kratos, watching him with wide dark eyes. He’d expected her to be gleeful, but she looked at him with her head cocked as if she couldn’t understand something.
“Who gave it to you?” Ramsay asked.
“Same little man who showed me the pictures.”
Ramsay sighed. “I should call Command and have them pick you up. If you could help them sketch the suspect, they might be able to track down whoever’s targeting Da’shay and the Kratos.”
Tom didn’t react. Whatever Ramsay said, Tom didn’t have the energy to disagree. Da’shay inched closer, her fingers splayed out on the side of the ship as she watched him with those big, dark eyes.
“I can call them, if you want. It doesn’t have to end here if you don’t want it to.” Ramsay almost sounded as if he wanted Tom to change his mind and Tom struggled to figure out what he was supposed to say.
Tom closed his eyes and let his head rest against the blast wall again. “Ain’t like it makes any difference.” He thought about that for a second—he thought about living in a little cage without any hope that he’d ever again touch a ship or a gun or a woman. “Just make sure my suicide note says something nice about my ma, okay?”
Moving to his side, Ramsay crouched down next to him. “How much they pay you, Tom? I need to know how many resources are lined up against us, so this is important.”
A laugh slipped out. “They didn’t,” Tom said. “I did it because I didn’t trust Da’shay in the crew, not because they paid me one credit.”
Ramsay stood up and Tom tried to ignore a tightness in his chest so bad that he couldn’t take a full breath. His air came in little gasps. A buzz startled him a half second before Ramsay turned him loose.
Tom’s eyes opened, but he stayed on the ground, looking up at Ramsay as he tried to understand what was going on. “You calling Command?” Tom asked warily.
“Aw, hell, Tom. You do complicate things.” Ramsay headed back toward the front of the ship.
Tom looked at the Kratos’ thrusters. “Not for much longer.”
“Come on.” Ramsay called him over, but Tom didn’t want to go. Ramsay was right that Tom wouldn’t survive a cage. It was better this way. He had a weird sense of calm looking at the end of his life and knowing that Ramsay had lined it up and all Tom had to do was die. It was also ironic that it was Ramsay and the Kratos killing him because he would have said that of all the ships he’d served on, this was the one where people were least likely to harbor homicidal thoughts about him. “Hurry up, we’re burning hydrogen,” Ramsay said.
Tom used the wall to push himself up. If Ramsay wanted to turn him over to the Corps to get information out of him, then that’s what Tom would do. His knees were still unsteady, but he managed to walk over to the side of the Kratos where Ramsay was standing. Da’shay had her back to the ship now, leaning against it with her eyes half-closed. She made a little keening sound that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It was her fault. He knew that, but if Ramsay didn’t believe it, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
Ramsay was talking and Tom had to concentrate on the words. “If I trusted Command to treat you fair, I’d let them punish you. A hundred lashes or a year in a prison cell wouldn’t be a bad way to remind you to stop and fucking think. Problem is that Command does tend to overreact when someone says something like ‘illegal tech’ or ‘attempted murder.’ But you will pay, Tom. There will be ship punishment for this, and if we don’t report this, that means we’re going to have to figure this out ourselves.”
Tom could only stare at Ramsay, not even sure he could follow the conversation. He’d had too many changes hit him too fast.
“As soon as we get back from this mission, we’re going to approach this just like we would any other investigation.” Ramsay glanced over at Da’shay. “We try to get some straight information about who might be trying to kill her, we run a sketch of the man you met through facial recognition, we figure out if anyone’s been checking on our files to see who might turn. And you remember that you’re not going to breathe without asking me for permission, because you’re the one who turned, Tom. Got it?”
Tom stared at Ramsay in confusion. “That’s it?” Tom couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t still chained to the wall.
“No, that’s not it. You’re on restriction to quarters until I feel like letting you out. If you want to pull a stunt this stupid again, let’s make sure you know what it feels like to live in a six by six box for a while.” Ramsay turned and walked toward the still open hatch. Da’shay walked over and picked up Tom’s handheld and came over with it held out like an offering. Tom stared at her, half expecting her to gut him on the spot. Instead she waited with her hand outstretched. Tom took his handheld and shivered from the intensity of her gaze.
“Get the lead out, Tom,” Ramsay called and Tom headed for the ramp, trying hard not to fall down because his knees still felt like rubber, Da’shay right behind him.
Chapter Eight
Tom paced the length of his room and back again. It took exactly three steps. He’d travelled those same three steps so many times that he was pretty sure the decking was going to start showing wear, but there was little else to do in the room.
His handheld was broken, cracked by the pulse blast. If he hadn’t believed Ramsay before, he did now. He couldn’t survive in a cage like this, not for the years he would be locked up if he was convicted of treason. God he was stupid. That wasn’t the worst part. When Ramsay looked at him, there was a wariness in the man’s eyes that made it pretty damn clear that Tom’s time on the Kratos was running out. Oh Ramsay would keep him around to investigate the little man Tom had met, but he figured two seconds after that, he was going to find himself either out of work or in a cell like this one for the rest of his life.
Lying down on the bunk, he stared at the low ceiling. His stomach growled and he scratched idly. Three days and no one had brought food. Tom could think of all sorts of reasons why that might be, but not many of them made sense.
If Tom was hiding information, making a prisoner worry about basic necessities was a standard torture technique. Illegal, but effective. If the Kratos was in trouble, crew might be too busy to bother, but the panel beside Tom’s locked door showed green lights.
So that meant there was some game being played. He’d thought the Kratos was different. He and Ramsay were colony kids—raised around enough dirt and poverty to appreciate what they had. The captain had a hard edge that made other smugglers believe he was one of them. Becca was from the colonies too, and so was the engineer before her. They all had a habit of speaking the truth, even Becca who did it with a smile so wide you didn’t figure out until days later that she’d insulted you.
If pushed, Tom would guess it was Da’shay trying to starve him out of the ship if she could. Hell, he wouldn’t even blame her. If she put a gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger, he’d call that self-defense and tell her she was in the right.
The door beeped, and Tom tossed his handheld onto the small table and stood up as it slid open. Even though the ship put the same air into every inch of the Kratos, Tom could swear the air from the hall just smelled fresher. Ramsay stood outside Tom’s quarters looking uncomfortable. “Thought we needed to talk about the mission.”
“Come on in,” Tom said with more than a touch of sarcasm. Tom didn’t have much else to say. He wasn’t even sure what the mission was since he’d been locked in his room during the briefing.
“You review the files?” Ramsay looked down at the table where Tom’s handheld sat. Eli stood at his six and Tom wondered if the man knew exactly what Tom’d done to get put on lock down. If he did, he was good at hiding his disgust.
“It’s broke,” Tom said with a shrug. “Get me a new one and I’ll review what I need to know, sir.”
>
Ramsay frowned. “Should’ve asked for a new one before. We’re landing in three hours.”
Tom didn’t answer. He’d done exactly what Ramsay had told him to and he still managed to fuck something up.
With a sigh, Ramsay ran a hand over his face and then tried again, this time his voice far more weary. “Why didn’t you ask Becca to fix this?”
“Ain’t like I could head over to the engine room and ask her to fix it up.”
“No, but when she brought dinner, you could have asked for a favor.” Ramsay crossed his arms, clearly unwilling to back down on this. However, Tom could only stare back. If Becca had brought him any dinner, he might have considered that. However, she hadn’t. Now Tom was wondering if maybe Becca wasn’t pissed with him, maybe for that mess on the docks when he’d been trying to ask her out. He didn’t think he’d said anything worth starving a man over, but she had been mighty pissed.
“You planning on explaining yourself?” Ramsay demanded.
“Wasn’t planning to, sir,” Tom answered. He didn’t know what was going on and he’d learned a long time ago that when he didn’t understand people, the best course of action was to keep his head down and either get out of people’s way or shoot them. He wasn’t shooting his own crew.
“Some days, I swear he does this to annoy me,” Ramsay complained.
“Yes sir,” Eli agreed, all military.
“I’m going to go see if Becca can replace this.” Ramsay picked up the handheld, “Give him the rough outline while I’m gone,” Ramsay told Eli before he walked out.
“What the hell did you do?” Eli asked the second the captain was gone. That answered one question.
Tom leaned back against the wall behind his bunk. “Fucked up on leave. Not like I haven’t done that before.”
Eli leaned against the wall and studied Tom. “Enough for three days confinement?”
“Yep,” Tom answered. The silence lasted just long enough to get awkward.
“What did you do this time? The captain isn’t talking.”
“Then I reckon I’m not either.”
Eli shifted from one foot to another and Tom had a little twinge of sympathy. It wasn’t easy being the one no one talked to, but that was Eli’s problem. He could suck it up and deal with it like the rest of them had when they’d been new on crew.
“I suppose I should cover the mission,” Eli said, some of the military starch back in his voice. “First stop in our mission is Nodar. We’re working with the explosion on the Reseda. The story is that we landed and the Reseda’s captain tried to double the price, and finally ended up refusing to sell at all. We had Becca bring the ship in fast, thinking he was trying to double cross us and take the money anyway, and venting the engines set off the explosion.”
“So, we’re telling them the truth?” That was novel. Of course, most times Tom didn’t talk to people much at all.
“We’re leaving out the part where we’re Corps.” Eli sat at the small table that was little more than a small oval welded to the wall. “So, the mission is to go in there saying we want whoever sent the Reseda out to double-cross us. We want credits to replace what got blown up and more to cover repairs to the Kratos and our medical costs. And if people get in our way, we’re mad enough to shoot our way through them.”
Tom narrowed his eyes on that one. Most planets, they used force only as the last resort. Even Tom thought twice before shooting a man because the paperwork on an unapproved kill was about more than he could take. The first time he’d shot a man who hadn’t had a chance to get off a shot at them first, Tom had almost quit. After that, he made sure he let the other side get off at least one shot before putting a bullet between their eyes. “How picky are they going to be about following protocols for lethal force?”
“This isn’t friendly territory. We can’t go to local Command and request backup. We may not be able to retreat if things get rough because we’ll have to wait on Nodar’s government to give us flight clearance or we’ll have to risk the orbital cannons. So Command’s first order is to blend in. Their second one is that if we get caught, they have no idea who we are.”
Scratching his arm, Tom thought about the setup. He’d have to watch Ramsay’s back and his own, and he still wasn’t sure Da’shay was on their side. “So, do I have to do anything other than shoot anyone who tries to shoot us?”
“You might.” Eli’s face twisted into a grimace for the briefest second, and then he cleared his throat and his all-military mask was back in place. “Command says that we may have to apply pressure on some people and that Ramsay is authorized to give orders in violation of Section 39-7.”
Tom stopped breathing. “They wrote that down?”
Eli shook his head. “No, they told the captain that in person before we left.”
That figured. If you ordered your officers to violate the rules against torture, you really didn’t want to leave an electronic trail leading back to you. Tom just wasn’t sure if Ramsay would actually do that.
Eli fell silent, a God-almighty unhappy look on his face. Tom figured Eli had put his faith in government laws and now Command was telling him he didn’t have to follow ‘em. If Tom were a little bit smarter, he might be able to figure out if that made Eli likely to quit or just take up drinking like the rest of them. Hell, even Becca knew how to get shit-faced when things got rough.
Eventually Ramsay showed up at the door, a new handheld in his hand. Instead of saying anything, he stood there, staring at Tom. His jaw was clenched and his white hair that had been tied back was pulled out one side. Tom traded an uncomfortable look with Eli. Something wasn’t right.
“Captain?” Eli asked, moving to the side as best he could in the cramped quarters.
“Tom, I’m so sorry,” Becca said, sticking her head around the captain so she could see into his room, and Tom was starting to feel more than a little claustrophobic with all these people in his room.
“For what?” Tom asked, suddenly even more uncomfortable. A little part of him wanted to push them all back out so he could have his room to himself, which was surprising considering he’d spent the last three days wishing he had something to distract him from a whole lot of ugly thoughts.
“I didn’t—” Becca swallowed, and it looked as if she was trying to push past Ramsay, but he didn’t give her enough room to fit. “I hadn’t worked on a raptor class ship before, and when I first joined up, I was all caught up in the technical specs and I read the other duties section, but it didn’t sink in. I never meant to forget you in here.”
“Sir?” Eli turned his back on Tom and focused on Becca and the captain.
“She hasn’t brought any meals,” Ramsay said, his voice tightly controlled. “Three days Tom’s been in here and she didn’t remember the part in the ship rules where the engineer was responsible for bringing meals when someone was restricted to quarters.”
“I’m really, really sorry,” Becca said. Her eyes were puffy, as if she might cry, and Tom shifted uncomfortably.
“Not the first meals I’ve ever missed,” Tom said.
Ramsay slapped his hand against the wall. “Why the hell didn’t you call someone?”
“With what handheld, sir?” Tom asked, looking at the one in Ramsay’s hand. It wasn’t as if he’d asked to have his computer broken, not when he was stuck for three days staring at the same walls wondering how much shit he was in.
Ramsay pointed to the control panel. “Then you hit the emergency button, but no, you have to play martyr and sit in here for three days without food. God damn it, Tom. Do you have even one ounce of common sense?”
There were a lot of things that ran through Tom’s mind. Emergency buttons were for emergencies and Tom wasn’t anywhere near starving to death. Even if he had hit the button, he had no way of knowing whether or not Ramsay was trying to teach him a lesson. Yeah, thinking on it now, it was unlikely, but he would have said it was unlikely that Ramsay would chain him to a wall and threaten to kill him and
Ramsay had done that. However, none of those excuses would sound right the second Tom started saying them out loud. He knew that. So instead, he stayed silent.
“He hasn’t eaten at all, sir?” Eli looked at Tom with something close to pity and Tom glared at the man.
“How long did you plan to sit in here? A week? Two weeks?” Ramsay demanded. “You two, out,” Ramsay said, poking his thumb toward the passage. Becca was already out, but Eli just about broke his neck getting past Ramsay.
“I’ll make you something really special, next stop,” Becca called, but her voice echoed from farther down the passage, so she was in full retreat. Ramsay had a way of going from looking like about the most average man around to looking as if he was about ready to take a man’s head off with his bare hands. No wonder they ran. However, Tom wasn’t one to be intimidated. He waited.
“Six fucking years, Tom. I know you’re a distrustful man; you have been since stepping foot on the Kratos. But after six fucking years, haven’t I earned enough of your trust to think I wouldn’t starve you to death?”
“Never thought you’d go that far,” Tom said all carefully. He sure as hell wasn’t going to mention that he thought Da’shay might be intercepting the food, not after the mess he’d gotten himself into with her already.
“But you thought I’d let you go hungry for three days?”
Tom shrugged. “My pa done as much when I wasn’t more than twelve. Didn’t seem all that unreasonable.”
Ramsay stared at him, his mouth half-open as if he’d been caught in the middle of saying something, only without the sound. Then he closed his eyes, and for a while there, Tom really wasn’t sure what was running through his captain’s mind because the man was looking mighty unhappy. Finally, Ramsay opened his eyes and his voice got that real quiet tone that meant he was trying his best not to shoot someone. “How long did you plan on letting this go on?”
