what’s going on.” Leif had worked himself back into a bad attitude. He and Dmitry began to square off; Tark sighed and realized that he had to rein things in.
“Alright. Major, come on.” Tark’s words might as well remained unspoken. Dmitry did not budge. Leif stood over him by several inches, was broader by several more, but Tark knew Dmitry would not back down. “Mr. Christensen, if you would? I’m sorry to have to do things this way, but I didn’t want to have news traveling ahead of me.” He gestured through a set of double doors. They all walked into an extremely chilly reception area. Tark slipped into a small office.
“You could play hockey down here.” Grace’s uncomfortable quip hung in the air, untouched. None of them felt jovial anymore. A sense of terrible anticipation fell over the group. An eternity later, Tark reappeared with someone. The coroner? She was hastily tying her hair up, tugging on exam gloves, commenting on the nature of “this one”. As it were, that it was “better” than the last one. They all knew to whom she referred. Antonio wondered what state the doctor’s remains were in. He shuddered a little.
“This way.” The presumptive coroner addressed them, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Nobody moved. The reality of what might be beyond, lying on a table, and in what condition…had just dawned on them.
“Who is in there?”
Tarkington and Petrovich said nothing. The woman, in her dark blue scrubs, took the few last steps and pushed open another set of double doors. Along one side of the room beyond were the expected drawers, on the far side, the tables. Only one was being used. The overhead light shone down brightly. They looked in; tried to process what shouldn’t be there. This wasn’t right.
۞
A nurse walked in. Bahur was still watching Maeve in a way that left her unsettled. She wished she could stand up and walk out, leave him behind, but that was not possible. Not yet. She could only match his gaze, and hope that the nurse would linger. Exhaustion nibbled away at her resolve to stay alert.
“They haven’t caught him yet, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Bahur seemed amused by her stubborn resistance to sleep.
“I figured.” She narrowed her eyes. “Actually, I was thinking about what I did to him. He probably lost a bit of blood…and the leg wound…. It does occur to me that he’s not in the best of health right now.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Well, unless he’s a doctor,” she said with deliberate slowness, “one might imagine that he’s gone to ground to fix himself up.” She watched Bahur carefully, trying to gauge his reaction. He had an awfully good poker face.
“Why do you think he was in your rooms?”
“Garden variety sexual predator, I suppose. He must have watched some one of us and realized that there are no other occupied apartments down there.”
“Seems a bit convenient.”
“Hardly. We’re not on the official rolls, if you know what I mean. We’re just guests.”
“We?” At that, Maeve relaxed. If he didn’t know about the others, maybe it was all right.
“My friends and me. We’re guests of the…station, I guess.”
“I see. If you’ll forgive my saying so, this whole scenario seems less random than it appears.”
“What do you mean?” She fiddled with the bed to try to get it sat up.
“Well, in accepting your theory, I believe we should have seen some evidence of sexual assault. But he didn’t try to do that to you, correct?”
“Um, no.”
“And the other young woman, the one in your bed,” he coughed uncomfortably, “no evidence there either.”
“Really?”
“This is what I have from our medical examiner. No findings of that nature. To me, that sort of says this guy was there to do a job.” Bahur fixed his cool grey stare onto the wall.
“A job. Killer for hire, that kind of job?”
“I suppose.” He watched as Maeve touched her chest where the knife had been. The processing of his theory fell against strong opposition. It wasn’t that she disagreed with his logic, merely that she hated the implications of it.
“When the other doctor, Hawke, when she was in the airlock…what she said, I thought she must have been delusional. Was she just warning us?” Maeve had seen her repeating her one small phrase.
“What did she say?” Bahur sat forward, seeming suddenly intense.
“They’re coming.”
۞Earthside – The Med
Boko had used up an entire ream of paper on airplanes, in an absentminded attempt to derail his insomnia. He sat in the half-light of daybreak, leant against his headboard, in the small bedroom of his apartment. He'd been awake most of the night, stubbornly refusing to turn on the bedside lamp. He told himself that he was trying to sort out his thoughts without the distraction of sight.
Fatigue hovered in the periphery, but he pushed it away. Folding paper blindly, he could hear his grandfather's voice echoing in the darkness. Kun had given him a second chance. Forgiveness had been granted without condition. Boko was sure that unspoken obligation had been in the gentle hand laid on his shoulder.
A touch that reminded him of when he'd left, in anger, cursing his family, his legacy, and unwanted responsibility. He still couldn't face those memories. It was far easier to simply accept the blame, and move on. It was only a weight, a burden. He could still hope that absolution might be granted him.
He dragged his reluctant brain back into the room with him, thinking about the task before him. The sheer magnitude of it was halved only by the fact that there was no need to infiltrate the organization that was being brought down. Boko the trusted and valued advisor would become the man who would kill Robert Warden.
Grandfather had not been eager to impart this responsibility onto his only grandchild, having only just gotten him back. But it was because of their long separation that Boko would be able to draw closer to his prey without arousing suspicion.
No one knew of any living relative to the man they knew as Bhujoung "Boko" Pritt, their associate who had come into his own after being a ward of the state during his minority. Boko had paid good money to erase his past, originally out of shame. Now he continued to use this to exact restitution. After it was all over, he would visit his mother. He owed her that much. He would never know if she could have forgiven him as his grandfather had done. She had passed into the shadow lands, from where honored ancestors watched over the living.
Warden was a man of habit, almost infant-like in his need to be on some sort of schedule from day to day. The results of a disruption were often felt rather resoundingly by his colleagues. Therefore, they'd all learned not to be the source of any such ripple. Boko had often felt as though, watching Warden move through their offices, that the man moved as though he was expecting an ambush at any moment.
He had been in the military for a few years in his younger days, according to the corporate dossier. Boko knew what had appealed to Warden about that kind of life, the power plays, the potential for destruction. But Warden had turned to more profitable ventures, and finally, to politics, when he could buy his way into them.
For Boko, that amounted to formulating a plan to destroy a man who had everything to lose, a man who was constantly aware of his own possible demise. It was a nearly impossible task, except, for some unfathomable reason, Warden saw Boko as a younger brother. Someone to trust and share all of his gruesome secrets with.
Boko didn't exactly consider himself to be an angel, but he found Warden's stories troubling, to say the least. Nor could he fathom why his boss had latched onto him. Not that it really mattered. Next week, they were set to go on a business trip together. Just the two of them, off to a remote operations headquarters. Next week, Robert Warden would have an accident. Boko finally put his head down; sleep had won him over.
۞The Nimitz
“What happened???” Grace shouted into the stunned silence.
“We were hoping you’d be able to shed some light….” Tark held u
p his hands to try and calm the crowd.
“On what? You think one of us would have done this?!?” Antonio felt ill. From across the room, all they could see was a pile of black hair.
“I think nothing, except that I have one more dead woman. Then there’s Maeve, who nearly suffered the same fate.” The room erupted into shouting.
The woman in scrubs, who was the medical examiner in reality, slowly backed out of the room. There was a little too much testosterone for her liking. This was why she only had dogs, truthfully. Training. As simple as clickers and biscuits.
“I will tell you everything I know, so long as you start doing the same. Enough with the secrets.”
“Fine.” Leif pointed to the steel table. “Start talking.”
“We found her in Ms. Howard’s rooms. Maeve herself walked in as the perpetrator was either finishing, or merely waiting for her. We’re not clear yet.”
“Why was Jemi in Maeve’s rooms?”
“Not clear yet.”
“Okay, what is clear? What do you know?”
“Perp was a male. Mid-thirties, average height and build, but ‘wiry’, Maeve hurt him pretty badly, from what we understand. He’s still at large, unfortunately.”
“What’s being done to find him?” Leif put his face inches from Tark’s, while the station commander tried to regain his bearing. Tark put out his hand to discretely back Leif off, while Dmitry moved to stand firmly by his friend’s side.
“We have a door to door currently in progress. We’ll find him. It’s not like he can run.”
“Colonel, have you forgotten what desperate people can accomplish?” Antonio did not take his eyes from Jemi’s face. She was gone. It was the first time he had ever seen the body of someone he’d known. He might have seen his mother, but he’d been a toddler. There was no memory from those days. Jemi’s hand was cool, not yet as chilly as the room.
“No, Mr. Assunta, that has not gone unthought. We’ve halted all traffic out though, and we can search this place rafters to rivets.”
“And what if he forces your hand?”
“You’ll be under protection. Critical areas of the station are already under guard.”
“Us? Why?”
“We have reason to feel that this was not a random attack.” Tark looked over at Dmitry. The other man shrugged. “We keep our ears to the ground when and where we feel it’s prudent. I’ve had some information come to my attention. It sounds as though, impossibly, you’re all on someone’s radar.”
۞
Maeve drifted in and out of sleep while present and past intertwined through her dreams. A sense of dread had worked its way in; she was slipping closer to the abyss. This time, though, there was an anchor. She could feel a tether to reality that had not previously been in place. She did not care to speculate as to its origins just yet. Rather, she needed to stop fighting herself and finally deal with the past.
Her dreaming mind walked along the edges of a black sandy beach. Bright blue waves churned to her left. Don’t hesitate. Go. She turned and dove into a tall wave. Water closed in around her, and the instinct to fight the current, to kick free, was strong. Instead, she let go, and floated away in a rip curl of unconscious thought.
It was an unpleasant ride up and over storm swells. She fought down fear, remembering that these were only dreams. A paddleboard bobbed to the surface nearby. She swam over, took hold of it, and kept going.
It was all there, on a distant shore. She sat on the board, looking into the distance, where fires raged. They’d been burning for some time, fueled by her inability to face them. The daggerboard scraped sand; she stood and walked into the flames. It was time.
۞
Wartime deployments had ended. It was supposed to be a draw-down period. Gradually, it became obvious that there were other reasons for