“Corporal,” I said, catching myself and remembering that I was supposed to be in charge, “take this piece of shit to the brig and throw him in, then stay on guard. Don’t let him talk to anyone until I’ve had a chance to speak to the Captain.”
“Yes, sir,” the Marine said, and picked Frank up by the collar. “Come along now, you fucker.”
Frank staggered out, half-dragged by the Marine. I watched him go, hoping he’d try to resist, and then turned to Ensign Gomez. She was shaking, holding her hands wrapped around herself, her eyes wide with fear. I touched her shoulder and she flinched back. Frank was luckier than he knew. If he’d still been there, I would have killed him personally.
“It’s all right now,” I said, as softly as I could. “He can’t hurt you any more.”
With a little help, I escorted her to Sickbay and handed her over to Doctor Choudhury. She was a small brown woman with an air of brisk competence and I trusted her completely. The Ship’s Doctor wasn’t a commissioned officer, nor was she in the chain of command, and younger officers and crewmen had a tendency to talk to her about their problems. I hoped that Ensign Gomez would talk to the Doctor, even though she would probably have to talk to the Captain later. Frank wasn’t a crewman, worse luck, but a guest with powerful connections. I wished Anna was onboard. It would be so much easier if I could drop it all in her lap.
“She’s not that badly injured, physically,” Doctor Choudhury said, twenty minutes later. She’d taken Ensign Gomez into an examination room, leaving me waiting outside pacing like an expectant father. It was all I could do to remain patient for two minutes. “There are some bruises on her thighs and neck, where he apparently held her, but she’ll recover from that quickly. There are no signs of internal damage, luckily. Mentally…”
Her face twisted bitterly. “Her confidence has been completely destroyed and… well, she’s not in a good state,” she added. “I’d prefer it if she were fighting back, frankly. We don’t have a proper team of psychologists here who could help her recover and… shipboard life is no place for anyone who has been raped like that. She thought the ship was safe.”
“I thought the ship was safe,” I said, bitterly. Rape was very common where I’d grown up, but I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. My sisters had never been raped — or had they been raped after I’d left. I remembered some of the bull sessions we’d had back as teenage men, talking about women and how sometimes you had to push them… had they led to rape? The bile welled up in my mouth and I had to swallow hard to prevent vomiting. “What are you going to do with her?”
Doctor Choudhury looked down at her terminal. “I’ve got her sedated right now,” she said. “I’ve taken samples from her skin and vaginal area and can prove that she definitely had sex with him, but it may come down to his word against hers.”
I stared. “And the screaming? The physical wounds?”
“There are two crewmen down in Engineering who inflict far worse on each other and love it,” Doctor Choudhury said. “I actually had to speak to one of them quite severely about how they were treating each other. I’m sure that some people get their thrills by being beaten with a rattan cane, but they were risking putting one of them here for longer than a day or two.”
“Ouch,” I said, wondering who the couple were, before returning to the important issue. “You can’t swear that she was raped?”
“I can swear that force was used,” Doctor Choudhury said. “I cannot prove that it was rape.”
“Shit,” I said. The last thing I wanted to see was Frank getting away with it. He might well get away with it. I couldn’t recall a single conviction for rape back home, despite thousands of complaints to the police. The police were more likely to dismiss the issue completely. They might even have their fun with the girl themselves. “Is there no proof you can offer?”
Her dark face was all the answer I needed. For a moment, I considered just walking into the brig and strangling Frank myself, but what would have been the point? I’d just have been charged with murder myself, perhaps even a war crime, which would have been ironic beyond belief.
“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “I’d better go report it to the Captain.”
The trial, such as it was, was a farce. I had forgotten how little power the Captain had over guests on his ship, particularly guests with political connections. The Political Officer served as the presiding judge and allowed Frank to conduct his own defence, facing Ensign Gomez herself. She wasn’t allowed a lawyer of any kind, despite UNPF Regulations stipulating that anyone involved in a court martial of any kind needed a lawyer, and it was easy to cast doubt on her testimony. The Doctor had to admit that there was no direct proof that she had been raped and I…I was told, by the Captain, to keep myself out of it. The ending was inevitable. Frank Wong was declared innocent. The only upbeat news was a conversation I overhead between Frank and the Captain, where he warned Frank in no uncertain terms that another rape would mean his instant death. Frank came out of that meeting sporting a black eye.
And Ensign Gomez? She never recovered from her experience, despite all the help that we could give her. At the end of our deployment, she was transferred to a research centre in deep space, well away from anywhere else. I pitied her more than anyone else. She’d once been full of promise, until a bastard with too many political collections had got his hands on her.
The remainder of the deployment — two years, mostly spent in orbit around Heinlein — went slowly. I ended up remaining on the Devastator most of the time — Frank had apparently asked for my removal from the reporter-babying duty — handling the duties of three other Lieutenants. I also spent more time on two other starships, replacing officers who had managed to get themselves transferred, or killed in the line of duty. Actually, one of them had been killed in a local brothel, but it had been recorded as a combat death. Heinlein being Heinlein, it probably was.
I had the faintest glimmerings of a plan before we started to prepare to return to Earth, but even with Kitty’s help, it would have to wait until we had some shore leave to ourselves. We also knew that we might not be together for much longer. I suspected that the Captain would approve my transfer request and Kitty might not be able to go with me, even though she wanted a transfer as well. She was technically senior to me. She might well be sent to another starship. I studied the lists of opening posts and tried to make a good case for us to be sent as a couple, but there were few openings for two lieutenants. There were plenty of possible posts for a single officer — and, of course, they might have been filled before I returned to Earth. Roger even offered to put in a good word for me with the Admiral, but the last thing I wanted was a post on the battleship. It was just too large.
The only peace of good news came in a week before we departed for Earth, having been finally relieved by the Annihilator. Frank, who hadn’t set foot on the starship since someone — not me — had played merry hell with the stateroom’s life support systems, had been finally sent out of Lazarus to report on the countryside and the ‘Heinlein Improvement Project’s’ progress. The insurgents located his convoy and attacked it. No one survived. The infantrymen who finally reached the convoy’s remains reported that someone had cut off his penis and stuffed it up his ass. I couldn’t help, but laugh when I heard the news. Never let them give you to the women…
“Serve the bastard right,” I gloated to Kitty. Ensign Gomez had perked up a little when she heard the news. Anna had convinced the Captain to allow her one of the spare cabins for her bunk, just so she wouldn’t be surrounded by male Ensigns, but it hadn’t helped. We’d even looked for a Rape Trauma Specialist down on Heinlein, but found none. Heinlein seemed to believe that the only good rapist was a dead one. How could I disagree? “I wonder how that’s going to be reported.”