Which won’t stop them leaving listening posts in a few sensible locations, James thought. That’s what we do, after all.
He keyed a switch. “All hands, this is the Captain,” he said. “We will remain under cloak, as planned, for the foreseeable future. I expect all of you to remember the silent running protocols.”
Closing the channel, he thought rapidly. The crew would be tense, he knew, but there was nothing he could do about that. There was something about being under cloak that made it harder for people to concentrate and left them whispering to one another, even though everyone knew sound didn’t travel through space. The XO would do her best to arrange activities for the crewmen, once they ran out of repair work to do; he hoped it would keep everyone distracted.
And stop our guests from complaining, he thought. The Ambassadors had taken their quarters in stride, but their aides had complained loudly. Perhaps they just hated the thought of having to share a cabin with their superiors. James, who had to share a cabin with his XO, found it hard to be sympathetic. And he was quite prepared to murder Uncle Winchester if he suggested that something untoward had developed between him and Commander Williams.
“Keep us on course,” he ordered, pulling up a tactical exercise. At least they had even more data on just what the aliens could do. But who knew what they’d kept hidden from humanity until it was too late? There was too much speculation and not enough hard facts. “Inform me the moment anything changes.”
Shaking his head, he activated the exercise and went to work.
Chapter Thirteen
“That was a major balls-up,” Kurt said, glowering at the assembled newcomers. Half of them looked as though they were going to start crying. “If the aliens had attacked us like that, you would all be dead. And so would the crew of this ship.”
He sighed, inwardly. Why was it a surprise, he asked himself sarcastically, that the trainee pilots had bigger egos than piloting skills? There was an old joke, after all, that if a pilot didn’t know who was the best pilot in the sky it sure as hell wasn’t him. But it couldn’t be tolerated, not now.
This was a bloody stupid decision, he thought, morbidly. But he still couldn’t see any workable alternative, save drafting pilots from the remaining home defence squadrons. And most of these pilots are going to end up dead when we first face the aliens.
“Get some rest,” he ordered, “then we will have a proper debriefing session and go through each and every one of your mistakes. In particular, you might want to think about the simple fact that there is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’ You are part of a team and if you can’t act as part of a team, you’ll be put on the benches and flogged. Dismissed!”
He watched them sidle out the room and sighed, bitterly.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to flog pilots,” Rose said, as soon as the compartment was empty. “There are regulations against making yourself or someone else unfit for military service.”
“It’s amazing what regulations permit, if you look at them in the right way,” Kurt said, shortly. Rose was the last person he wanted to speak to at the moment. “It’s semi-legal to put someone in an airlock and threaten to decompress it to teach them a lesson.”
Rose snorted, then strode over to the hatch and locked it. “We need to talk,” she said, turning to face him. She rested her hands on her hips as she glared. “What is wrong with you?”
Kurt started. “Wrong with me?”
“You’ve been moping around like a depressed donkey for the last week,” Rose snapped. “I think I’ve been doing a shitload of your work in getting those incompetents ready for battle and cleaning up their messes. You’ve barely been present at training sessions that don’t involve you personally and…”
She took a breath. “And you declined my advances over several days,” she added, her voice softening. “Kurt… what is wrong with you?”
Kurt stared down at his hands. He wanted to tell her… and yet he didn’t dare. But that, his conscience prodded, was a cowardly attitude. Her career was at stake too. Hell, for all he knew, the people who were blackmailing him had also made advances to her, although that would have been harder. He’d been the only one to leave the ship and go to Luna City. In hindsight…
His blood ran cold. In hindsight, how had the blackmailers known he was going to go to Luna City?
Rose took his hands and guided him towards a chair, then pushed him into it. His mind blurred, part of him remembering him kneeling before her and taking him in her mouth, part of him recognising her concern as friendly, rather than sexual. He wanted to cry, to lose control completely and start screaming at the bulkheads, but somehow he held himself under control. She didn’t deserve to watch him come apart at the seams.
“Kurt,” Rose said, quietly. “What happened on Luna?”
Kurt swallowed, then decided to be honest. “I was ambushed,” he said. “And blackmailed.”
Rose’s eyes suddenly went very hard. “Blackmailed with what?”
“Us,” Kurt said. “Our relationship. They said they’d tell the entire universe if I didn’t do as they said.”
Rose stood upright, letting go of his hands. “Shit,” she said, as she started to pace the compartment. “What else did they say?”
Kurt ran through the whole story from start to finish, then put his head in his hands. It was over. He’d ruined her life as well as his own. God knew it would have been smarter to desert and take her with him. Or perhaps…
“They say they have proof,” Rose said, slowly. “What proof do they have?”
“Footage of us… making love,” Kurt said. “They must have been spying on us for quite some time.”
“Or maybe they got lucky,” Rose said. “Where was the footage taken?”
Kurt hesitated, trying to place it. He should have studied it more carefully when Fred had waved it under his nose, instead of trying to recoil in horror and denial. If he’d taken the terminal and its compromising recording for himself… he thought hard, trying to recall the details. It had looked like a hotel room…
“The hotel we went to in Sin City,” he said, finally. “I think…”
Rose snorted. “Such footage can be faked,” she said, snidely. “How many times did you go to Sin City as a young man and fuck the latest entertainment star in a VR environment? I believe that fucking Princess Elizabeth is quite common among some of the younger generation of pilots. They just plug in the right simulation and fuck away.”
“The footage would be perfect,” Kurt reminded her. “They’d have everything just right, from your breast size to my hairy chest.”
“My breasts are a matter of public record,” Rose sneered. “I had to be measured for the flight suit, remember? Given sufficient access, it would be easy to come up with footage that would be practically perfect in every way.”
She walked back over to him and patted his shoulder. “It might seem bad,” she said, “but it isn’t a total disaster.”
“It is,” Kurt said. “The allegations will trigger another investigation, just like the one into Prince Henry’s death. They will uncover time we spent together, more than could reasonably be justified. And then they will put us on the stand and ask us if we were in a relationship…”
“We’re also heroes,” Rose said. She snorted. “Ok; they find out proof we’ve been fucking during our off-duty hours. They try to charge us with breaking regulations. The public crucify them. They’d be much smarter to ask us both to resign with honour and bury the entire scandal under the rug.”