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CHAPTER EIGHT

A week later the Invincible had returned to Ontario Base for resupply and the inevitable Court of Inquiry. Peter Raeder stood watching the huge construct grow slowly in the wardroom holoview, glumly noting the swarming dots of light that surrounded it, markers of growth and new building. New ships and new personnel, the Commonwealth girding itself for war . . . and the Invincible wasn't nearly as much a part of it as it should be.

The reception at the docking bays didn't help. Whenever he left the ship, as now, everyone around took note of his passage, staring until he'd passed by. It wasn't just him, either. The entire crew was going twitchy from the awed silence that followed them wherever they went. And the officers discovered that good company was hard to find as their brother officers from other ships or from the station kept them at arm's length or worse, pestered them with obnoxious questions.

Peter's mind was racing and so was his pulse as the hour approached when the Court of Inquiry would convene. He wasn't looking forward to testifying. The thought of sitting up before his fellow officers as well as the members of the committee to tell them all in public and for the record just how badly he'd screwed up was like a vise around his heart.

In addition, there was so much to do on the Invincible and there were so many places he had to be. He had an appointment with the quartermaster of the Forward Supply Depot this very afternoon to plead that Invincible's needs rated a priority status.

Raeder knew he had a good case. He also knew that had little to do with whether he would actually receive the necessary replacement parts and Speeds he'd requisitioned. Politics, he thought bitterly. And if the court's session should run over and he had to cancel the appointment, the Virgin Mary and all the saints wouldn't be able to shake more than the bare TOE minimum from FSC's grasping hands. Or so my instincts tell me. 

Then later in the afternoon Pilot Officer Longo's funeral was scheduled. An event he dreaded. He wasn't looking forward to offering condolences to her husband and ten-year-old daughter. Facing their pain seemed impossibly difficult and he would rather do anything else. Especially since they're bound to blame me for her death. With considerable justification.

Peter couldn't get out of his mind the look in the captain's eyes as he'd listened to just how the defective Speed was released for duty. Knott had accepted Raeder's report without any other comment than, "There'll be a board of inquiry, of course, Commander Raeder. Hold yourself in readiness to testify." Peter squirmed inside at the memory. It was obvious that he hadn't lived up to Knott's expectations, either as an investigator or as a flight engineer.

Besides that, he was easily as depressed as the rest of the crew over Longo's untimely and unnecessary death, but his position forbade him to show it. And for someone with Raeder's emotional Celtic blood, not to show his feelings was stretching his acting abilities to the limit.

But who could possibly have imagined— Raeder stopped that train of thought cold. He knew from frustrating experience that it only went round and round. And beating myself up will solve nothing. Just as he'd solved none of the mysteries surrounding the two murders on the Invincible. But he would, by God. For now, it was time to think of the matter at hand.

He took his seat and looked around the courtroom, thinking with mild surprise, It looks just like I expected. 

The walls were paneled, or very good virtual paneling, possibly a holo-generated image of richly veined and carved mahogany. There was a long table of solid oak at the head of the room with six chairs upholstered in green leather behind it.

On the wall in back of them hung a magnificent painting of the battle of Chung Quo, when a group of excessively ambitious mining consortiums had hired mercenaries and rebelled against the Commonwealth. Space Command had defeated them utterly, freeing the miners and their families from the virtual slavery the consortiums had imposed on them and giving both the mercenaries and their employers considerable cause for regret.

The star-spangled flag of the Commonwealth was displayed to the right of the painting, the blue-and-black flag of Space Command on the left. Facing the committee's table was a smaller one with a single chair in front of it for the witnesses. The small room was elegant, well proportioned, official. And it smelled of beeswax polish; that probably was real mahogany, then.

It's so rare that things live up to expectation. Why did it have to be a courtroom? Raeder looked down at his folded hands, feeling depressed and put upon. All right, he told himself sternly, that's enough of that "poor little me" stuff.

Peter straightened in his seat. Think of Cynthia. The poor kid is the only one of us who wanted to keep that damn Speed in the hangar and she's in jail for it. Besides, I just can't see her as a murderer. I can see her getting murdered, she's that aggravating. But frankly, people just aren't that important to her. What they say, what they think . . . it's simply of no consequence. 

In the very first row Captain Knott and the XO, Mai Ling Ju, sat in solitary splendor, glimmering with medals and braid. Raeder was in the row behind them. Beside Peter sat a silent and grim-faced arap Moi; two vacant seats down from him was the Invincible's quartermaster, John Larkin, looking unusually solemn. Behind them sat Squadron Leader Sutton, Lieutenant Givens, and the rest of the squadron. Raeder thought he could feel their accusing eyes on him, but resisted the urge to look.

There was a stir at the rear of the hearing room and the sound of quite a lot of people moving forward. Raeder looked up and saw William Booth, Lieutenant Robbins in handcuffs, and two security guards.

"Would you excuse us," Booth said harshly, indicating that he wanted them to move down so that he and his prisoner could have the first two seats.

The captain turned around, glanced over the Security chief's party, and motioned Booth over to him. The chief leaned down and the captain spoke softly in his ear. Raeder watched Booth's neck slowly turn pink, then crimson, then as close to true red as he'd ever seen a human being go.

"Yes, sir," Booth said. When he straightened up his face was dewed with sweat. The Security chief saluted and after a beat the captain acknowledged it.

"Carry on," Knott growled.

Booth turned to Robbins, fumbling with the cuffs until he could find the thumbprint scanner that would unlock them. Then he handed the cuffs to his minions and dismissed them gruffly.

Arap Moi moved one seat over and Raeder tugged Cynthia down into the vacated seat, leaving Booth to glower briefly and then clamber over an unmoving arap Moi to the vacant seat beyond.

The sergeant-at-arms entered from a door at the front of the room and barked, "Ten hup!"

All those present stood to attention as one, a legacy of academy days. At the front of the room, six men and women quietly filed in and took their places at the table. Three of the members were flight engineers like Raeder and Robbins, one was a squadron leader, one was in administration, and one was a quartermaster: the chair would be the highest-ranking officer.

"Please be seated, ladies and gentlemen," an attractive woman with wavy, silver-gray hair invited in a delicate Danish accent. "I am Vice Admiral Paula Anderson, chair of this committee. We are met today

 

 

 

 

to determine if there is sufficient evidence of criminal negligence or sabotage to hold Commander Peter Raeder and Second Lieutenant Cynthia Robbins for court-martial." She looked out over the courtroom, her ice-gray eyes pausing briefly at Knott, Raeder, and Robbins. "These are serious charges and I assure you that this board will explore this incident zealously and with all due dispatch." She struck the gavel once on its board and said, "This committee is now in session."

"Lieutenant Oswald Givens, please come forward," the sergeant-at-arms commanded.

"Oswald?" Cynthia murmured in pained disbelief.

Raeder glanced at her. Maybe I've been wrong about you, Lieutenant, he thought, admiring her sympathetic reaction.

Givens approached the table and chair before the committee awkwardly, as though physically he'd regressed to sixteen. He hesitated so long with his hand on the chair that the vice admiral said, "Please be seated, Lieutenant Givens," with just the faintest touch of asperity.

"Yes, sir," he said and dropped into it like a sack of potatoes.

"Originally, Lieutenant, your Speed had been pulled from the roster on the day of the incident. Would you please tell us about that?"

He did, and went on to describe the incident in full: the Speed going rogue, its unbelievable murder of Pilot Officer Longo, his rescue, and relief on his return to the Invincible that Lieutenant Robbins was in custody.

"But by your own admission, Lieutenant, she alone was adamant that you should not take that Speed out," one of the flight engineers, an older man with smooth dark hair and a formidable jaw, remarked.

Givens seemed nonplussed. "But don't you find that suspicious, sir? Two other qualified experts didn't think that little glitch was anything significant. Yet Lieutenant Robbins insisted on having her objections made a matter of record." He made a small nervous gesture. "To me that just smacks of trying to cover herself." He shrugged. "It's just suspicious, that's all. To me."

"Thank you, Lieutenant, but we are more interested in your direct observations than your opinions. Next witness."

"Like Lieutenant Givens," Squadron Leader Sutton said after he'd been examined, "I find Lieutenant Robbins' prescience entirely too coincidental to be believable." He shook his head dubiously. "No, it's just too pat. Who knows but if Givens had flown that Speed one of the previous times she wanted it held back, it might have gone rogue the sooner. And with no superior officer to look over her shoulder we might have lost Givens, as well."

"But why would she do that, sir?" the board's quartermaster member asked. "What could she possibly gain?"

Sutton gave a little laugh, "As to that, sir, I've no idea, the human mind is not my forte. Some bizarre variety of Munchausen by Proxy disease, perhaps?" He lifted his fingers from the table before him in a kind of shrug. "Our Speeds are like surrogate children for the lieutenant; perhaps she makes them `sick' to get attention and sympathy. Though she's not really a very sympathetic character."

"Good grief!" Robbins muttered to Raeder. "Thank God he's not a Freudian. If he was he'd be talking about how penile Speeds are and how I equated Givens' with an unfaithful lover that was having an affair with the lieutenant. So I decided to kill them both in a jealous rage. Tsk!" She glanced at Peter from the corner of her eye, then did a double-take at his astonished expression.

Thanks a lot, Cindy. It's sure going to be easy testifying with that thought in my mind. "Some choice," Raeder said aloud, "Medea or Clytemnestra."

She gave him an odd look, and so did Vice Admiral Anderson, so Peter shut up, turned forward, and tried not to slouch down in his chair.

"What is your reaction to these accusations that Lieutenant Givens and the squadron leader have made against you?" the vice admiral asked Cynthia before she asked Lieutenant Sutton anything else.

Robbins looked thoughtfully down at the table before her and spoke without looking up, as though reading from a text.

"I suppose they're regretting the force of their arguments which resulted in reversing my decision to withhold Lieutenant Givens' Speed from the exercise. They want this to be anyone's fault, anyone's mistake but their own."

Raeder heard a sibilant hiss as the entire squadron sucked in its breath, whether in fury or astonishment he couldn't tell. But personally, I think it's a pretty perceptive answer. 

When Raeder's turn came, he sat and replied crisply, answering the board's questions as best he could, all the while trying to fight off the recurring feelings of guilt that had assailed him since the incident.

"Why didn't you back up your second?" Anderson asked him.

"Because, sir, we had run every diagnostic we could think of, and none of them provoked any sort of negative response. The AI handled everything we threw at it with ease. Certainly there was no sign of a complete breakdown."

"So there was no warning whatsoever?" one of the flight engineers asked him.

Raeder shook his head, his gaze steady. "Just a slight peculiarity on one diagnostic screen and the preternaturally sharp instincts of Lieutenant Robbins, sir."

Vice Admiral Anderson raised a brow at that. "You praise the lieutenant's instincts, Commander Raeder, yet you overruled her on the day."

"I am now painfully aware of how mistaken I was," Raeder said. "I had read in her personnel file of how uncanny she could be in diagnosing problems. But it seemed to me at the time I read it to be merely hyperbole."

There was no need to ask if the error disturbed him; it was obvious to all present that it did.

It was a long and arduous day, with all of them being questioned closely by the committee. The questions were probing, intelligent and, much to Raeder's relief, completely unbiased, so far as he could tell.

As Vice Admiral Anderson had promised they were working with dispatch, as well. By 1400, they had only John Larkin left to examine.

Although why they want to question the quartermaster is beyond me, Raeder thought. He doesn't deal with software, except to hand over the sealed package, and that's almost certainly where the problem was. 

The panel didn't have much to ask him, either. They managed a few polite questions for form's sake, learning about all the perfect parts that left his hands and became dreck in Lieutenant Robbins', and that he had felt driven to protest this anomaly in writing.

"Thank you for appearing, Quartermaster," the vice admiral said. "You may step down."

"Vice Admiral," Larkin said, his face a study in anxiety, "I'd like to make a statement for the record."

Anderson's eyebrows went up, but she nodded.

"I regret the necessity for saying this," Larkin went on, "but I feel an obligation not to waste this opportunity to speak out." He paused and chewed his lower lip, his eyes fixed on the floor at his feet. "It is my considered opinion, after working with her for approximately two months, that Lieutenant Robbins is a dangerously unstable personality. She takes umbrage at the most commonplace remarks, she holds grudges, she's resentful and sullen and as obstructive, when anyone's opinion clashes with hers, as she can possibly be. I honestly feel that she is quite capable of rigging someone's Speed to teach them a lesson."

He gave Raeder a quick glance, then coloring slightly, he looked away. "I therefore urge this board to find that Second Lieutenant Cynthia Robbins be held for court-martial. I suspect that this young woman is in dire need of counseling and therefore to be pitied. Nevertheless, her general behavior hints that she is potentially extremely dangerous and capable of anything. It is my fervent belief that she should be removed from her duties as soon as possible for the safety of all aboard the Invincible."

Anderson gave him a quizzical look, then nodded. "Thank you, Quartermaster, for your opinion. It will be given all the attention it deserves, I assure you."

 

 

 

Raeder stood. "Vice Admiral, may I also make a statement for the record?"

The vice admiral's lips puckered as though she were tasting something sour. "Very well, Commander," she said evenly, "you may proceed."

"I have only worked with Lieutenant Robbins for a short while, sir. But in that time I have found her to be an unusually competent flight engineer, passionately devoted to her work. Frankly, sir, I believe that if the lieutenant wanted to attack someone, she would never damage a Speed to do it."

Anderson's brows rose once again, and her eyes widened. "Thank you, Commander. And we shall certainly take your opinion into consideration as well." She looked left and right at her fellow board members, each of whom shook their heads, and then announced, "As there are no more witnesses to examine, this board will retire for its deliberations. We will convene again in this chamber at the same time tomorrow." With that she struck the board with her gavel and rose, the rest of the committee, the spectators and witnesses rising just a beat behind her. Then the board filed out and the sergeant-at-arms closed the door behind them.

Raeder turned to Robbins to reassure her and met an expression that was half stunned, half glare.

"Thank you, sir, for your defense of me. It made me sound . . . so much more sane."

"C'mon, Robbins," Booth said, taking her arm. "You better come with me."

Raeder opened his mouth and then closed it. The woman has a point, he told himself. But, hey, I was caught completely off guard here. He'd never have expected the cheerful, pleasant quartermaster to be capable of that kind of unwarranted attack. Although, if it's his honest opinion . . . Still, he hadn't liked it. Raeder looked around, but Larkin was gone.

"That was an unpleasant surprise, sir, wasn't it?" arap Moi asked, his face a stiff mask that ill-concealed his anger. "He has so little to do with the lieutenant, I wonder how he came to form such strong opinions."

"So do I," Raeder answered. And come to that, I wonder how he just happened to be on Main Deck the night before the exercise. 

 

"Peter!"

Raeder's hesitation was more mental than physical. He kept on walking, pushing past a group of off-duty Marines with the look of people getting their first liberty after some hard action. One of them was trying to balance a glass of beer on her shaven head while juggling what looked like eggs . . .

"Yup, eggs," he muttered as one landed on the corridor deck near his foot with a crackling splat.

"Hey, Raeder, wait up!"

A hand grasped at Peter's elbow; he froze and looked down at it, a slight frown marring his otherwise bland expression.

"Hey, man, don't be like this. Just let me explain. Okay?" Larkin's earnest face looked more choir-boyish than usual.

Raeder tightened his lips and just stared into the quartermaster's blue eyes, looking for he knew not what.

"You have something to say to me?" he asked evenly.

"Look," John said holding up his hands, "I couldn't warn you because I didn't even know myself that I was going to say it."

"That's very perceptive of you, John," Peter said, cocking his head to one side. "You've put your finger on one of the reasons why I'm thoroughly disgusted with you."

"You haven't worked with her as long as I have," Larkin snapped defensively. "When the parts kept coming back defective, you think I just boxed 'em up and put 'em away? I have a budget too, y'know. I went to Okakura and said, `What should we do about this?' And he suggested that I get together with his second to see what we could find out. I tried, man! I arranged meetings, I double-checked my stuff, I questioned my people." Larkin was taking on a sort of belligerent pout now. "You know what she did? She was late or missed meetings, she kept things from me, she complained I was harassing her, and on and on. Hell, Okakura tore a strip off me, off me, like I wasn't even a brother officer for some stupid complaint she made about how aggressive I was. She'd missed four meetings, Raeder! No explanation, no apology, nothing. I outrank the buffoon and she's treating me like some little nuisance! Wouldn't you get aggressive eventually?" He stood with his hands on his hips, breathing slightly faster. "It needed to be said," Larkin insisted, looking away. "And no one else was going to do it. It wasn't easy, and I'm not proud of it, but it had to be done."

Raeder switched his case from one hand to the other.

"So, is this an apology, or what?" he asked.

"It's not an apology for saying what I thought needed to be said," Larkin said calmly, looking directly into Peter's eyes. "But it is an apology for not being able to give you fair warning." He hesitated and then held out his hand.

Raeder looked at it, considering, then took it. What the hell. I'm not happy, but if it's his honest opinion, based on previous experiences that I don't happen to share, he allowed himself an inner sigh, then I don't feel comfortable holding it against him. After all, it's so rare you meet an honest quartermaster. I feel we should encourage the breed. 

Larkin grinned like a kid getting a bike for his birthday. "I've come down to add my voice to yours, here," he said, gesturing down the corridor to FSC. "I'm also going to hand in a report on our damaged parts problem."

"Great!" Peter said, and meant it. Just don't make any unexpected denunciations of my character. Okay? I can't afford it. His own reception, as he'd foreseen, had been chilly in the extreme. Being on the verge of a court-martial hadn't won any hearts in Forward Supply. Assuming they have hearts to be won in the first place. "Go get 'em with my blessing," Raeder said. "I didn't get the impression they liked me."

"That's 'cause you don't know the secret handshake," Larkin said with a grin. "I'll catch you later."

Well, that's a load off my mind, Peter thought as he walked on. Though I don't think it would cut any ice with Lieutenant Robbins. 

 

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