this alive, Robert, I’m going to kill you next.” He ignored the pain from his leg. He would fix that later.
۞
Still on the floor back in her room, Maeve picked away at the cobwebs to come back to the surface. She tried to stand. No good. Not yet. Maybe she could crawl. Breathing past nausea, determined to make the call for help. Whoever that guy had been, he couldn’t get too far with his leg in the kind of shape it was in. Unfortunately, her resolve was worth squat at that point, she soon found herself sitting only feet away from her goal, sweating and swearing.
At least Dem would arrive soon. If he didn’t get sidetracked along the way, that was. Her eyelids sank, she shivered as the environmental cooling kicked on; the only thing keeping her awake was the brutal throbbing of her leg and collarbone as blood pooled beneath the skin. Where was Dem, god…dammit, she needed him, or anyone with morphine. The urge to pull the knife was strong, but she fought it down.
The light in her bedroom was on. Strange, she had thought for sure that it had been off. Her vision swam and blurred for a moment, but she thought she saw someone in there. Was it him? Was he still there? She lurched back onto her knees, looking for a weapon, looking back up to see if he’d moved. But it wasn’t him, was it? She could only see long hair, spilling over the edge of the bed. She jumped, hearing the door vibrate as someone pounded outside.
۞
“Maeve?” Dmitry had run the entire way from the staircase to Maeve’s room. It was a strange, unaccountable feeling, and he prayed he was absurdly wrong. He looked more carefully at the door. There was a note from her to come in when he got there. She’d counted on being in the shower or something, getting ready. He took a deep breath and went inside.
“Shit.” He suddenly felt that he had not been wrong.
The whole place was dark, except the bedroom. He only made it a few steps when he felt something crunch under his feet. Groping for a light in the darkness, he turned one on with a tap of his finger. The place was a wreck.
There was dirt, broken glass, books, but where was she? A scuffling noise made him whip around. Maeve was there, on the floor, looking into the bedroom. Her head was cut, there were marks all over her throat, and worse. He bit back the cry that welled up from deep within him.
“I don’t suppose you fell, did you?” She shook her head wanly. “Hang on then, I’ll take you over to the clinic.”
“No, wait.”
“Wait?” His voice was verging on frantic. “You’ve got a knife in your side! There’s no waiting.”
“Go look. Please. Go see who it is.” She was still staring into the bedroom. Dmitry thought for a moment that she was delirious, but he turned his head and saw what she saw. He sprinted over to the intercom and called the emergency number.
“He was already inside, waiting for me. Please, go see who is in there.”
“I think I saw him. Out in the corridor.” The moment seemed more and more surreal as he gingerly stepped over the debris toward the other room.
۞
“Have you seen Miss Madoc?” Tark was down in the science labs, where Sa’andy typically worked. It was an hour past when she had been due back. He wasn’t worried. She was prone to disappearing into research papers or protocols.
“Um, no, not for a while. She said she had something to do, someone to talk to, I think. She left at about fifteen-thirty, if I remember correctly.”
“Huh. Thanks. If she comes back, just remind her that we’re supposed to do some, um, wedding planning. Thanks.” The knowing smiles worn by Sa’andy’s colleagues said that she must have told them how she’d proposed. It felt awkward, even though he’d said it wasn’t a big deal. His comm vibrated. He tapped his earpiece and answered.
“Tarkington.”
“Hey.” Dmitry sounded odd.
“What’s up? You okay?”
“Not really. You need to get down to Maeve’s room. Now.” His tone did not brook questioning or argument.
۞
“Okay, what’s up?” Grace looked at the three “boys”, as she called them.
“Um, no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Aren’t we all supposed to be headed to the theater?”
“Waiting for Jemi.”
“She knows where it is, right?”
“Gracie, we don’t leave a man…woman, whatever, behind. We said we’d wait, we’ll wait. She probably had to use the potty.”
“Wow. Just…wow.”
“What?”
“Leif, you’re a grown man. Women don’t use the potty, unless they have a small child with them.”
“She could have had.”
“Josh? Did she say anything to you?”
“No. But that’s because she hasn’t actually been here yet today.”
“Someone could have mentioned that!” They were all lazed out on the furniture, eating snack foods, watching something on the video screen. Grace turned it off.
“Hey! That was the 2020 Super Bowl! My daggone team finally made it, and you turned it off!”
“It’s recorded, you ass! We’re late. I’ll leave her a note, or something.”
“Listen, I know you’re all excited that you might get to blow crap up again, but we’re,” he gestured to Antonio, Josh, and himself, “taking this news a little bit at a time.”
“Get out the DOOR!” She put on her DI voice and let them have the rest of the boom. Boom.
۞
Tark felt a leaden weight begin to settle into his chest. It was difficult to imagine what might be happening in Maeve’s room that required his immediate presence. It was probably not good. His foreboding turned to dread as he made his way down below decks. There were medical personnel and PMO’s swarming. He stopped in his tracks as he saw a gurney go ahead of him with a body bag on it.
What in the name of god was happening on his station?
۞
Julieta was not at the theater either. They went up to the private apartments, and into a library. Wallace was pacing around, clearly distracted. Mrs. Han sat nearby, swirling a cup of tea as she listened to something through an earpiece. Leif pointedly ignored Wallace, and made his way over to scan the shelves for anything of interest. Their host was evidently a collector of actual print, including graphic novels.
“Something has happened.” The old woman’s voice cut through the still air. They all exchanged looks. “We may have underestimated Warden.”
“Something? Is Master Kun all right?” Wallace stepped toward her anxiously.
“It seems likely that…I do not speak of things back on Earth, however. I was listening to the radio chatter here on the station. There is a manhunt. Something happened in one of the lower levels.”
“We just came from down below. Didn’t see anything….”
“Yeah, but we were on the near end, in my apartment. And we took the lift up.”
“The near end? As opposed to what, the rear end?”
“Leif, our rooms were deliberately spaced out, right? And mine is all the way at the opposite end from the commercial district.”
“And Maeve’s rooms. Has anyone talked to her today?”
“No. She’s been keeping to herself a bit since that whole thing with the station doc happened.”
“I think that she hasn’t necessarily been by herself.” Grace wore a knowing smile.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Wallace interjected at the same time as Antonio and Josh tried to shush her.
“She’s been with the base XO, Major Petrovich. He seems like an okay guy, for a guy.” She kept her smile in place, carefully ignoring everyone else. Antonio smacked his palm to his forehead. How could Grace of all people be so oblivious to the need for discretion? Of course, she didn’t have to be discreet anymore, so maybe she had stopped thinking before she spoke. Or maybe she wanted to toss out the apple of discord…for what, fun?
“I thought they had sort of gone their own ways, or something.” Leif looked a bit grey around the edges. Josh joined
in frowning as loudly as he could at Grace, who was still oblivious to any problem. Probably she thought she was just twisting the knife for Wallace, Josh realized.
“I think Gracie means that they’ve been hanging out, friendly like.”
“Um, no, somebody told me that they saw her leaving his place early the other morning.” She sat back and yawned. Wallace was miserable. He’d seen them together. He’d hoped it was just a distraction, but not so. Maeve had moved on. He failed to spot Leif’s reaction. The other man had turned to look out a window. Josh went over.
“Hey. You ok?”
“It’s her life. She can live it.”
“Yeah, but if you never tell her, it’s going to kill you. And who knows, maybe she just fell into the first pair of open arms she came across.”
“Now that is comforting.”
“Sorry.”
“I did not see this coming.”
“I think you may have said that already.”
“Hmph.” Leif threw himself into a chair to sulk.
Mrs. Han shook her head. Young people. She was just as glad that hormones were a thing of her past. She tucked her tiny earpiece back into place and continued to listen. Whatever was going on, station personnel were being very cryptic about it. It was as though they were worried about being overheard. Ludicrous.
۞
He brushed loose hair from her forehead, trying not to look at the rest of her.
Her face was peaceful, indescribably so. It didn’t seem real.
Dmitry had seen the dead before. It was an unavoidable part of peacekeeping. Death hunted and stalked, always. But here, on the Nimitz, they’d been lucky. It had always been life in a protective bubble.
He sighed, looking away. Death had found their address. The spell had been broken. Tark was not going to like this. He walked back out to Maeve, feeling still that lightning strike of anguish at seeing her like this.
Emergency medical personnel worked calmly and swiftly over her. She was pale again, as when he’d first met her. Blood was everywhere, but one of the investigators, Carson, assured him that it was not all Maeve’s.
“She must have gotten him good.”
“We’re positive it’s a male?” Without considering the tests that the investigator had already run, he said this. A moment later, he noted the pitying look Carson was giving him. “Sorry, my stupid moment. Anything else to know?”
“Nothing. Absolutely zero in the databases. I mean, the blood is human, and male, as I said, and A positive, but aside from that…nothing.” She held up her hands in defeat.
“How is that possible?” It was a universal (if not despised and debated) fact that every human child born got logged into a DNA base. That information was supposed to be inaccessible except to law enforcement. It was possible that some slipped through the cracks, but those people were usually not a part of mainstream society.
“I have no answer for that, sir. Once we start really poking around, we may find something, or an absence of something, if you know what I mean.”
“You think somebody erased a DNA profile?” A far worse thought surfaced in his mind. “Or maybe it was never there to begin with.” He looked over at Maeve. She surely would have said something if she’d known her attacker, wouldn’t she?
“I don’t think anything…yet.”
“Frankly, I don’t like either scenario.” Trying to think back to the guy who’d run into him, he found he was unable to summon a clear description. He also saw that Carson was unwilling to say anything further.
A niggling memory from all the traffic that had gone in and out of Hawke’s personal comm occurred to him. Embedded in one was the hint of a rumor he’d heard years ago, about some secret society. It seemed implausible now, but perhaps less so than when he had first heard it.
The emergency team were standing around the stretcher, getting ready to move Maeve. He leaned over her, holding her hand gingerly.
“I’ll be right behind you. Just need to wait for T…” Dmitry gave