up. Keep your hands away from your weapons. We don't want to spook him.'
'I should go in first,' said Frost. 'I'm more expendable than you.'
'No offense, Investigator, but you do tend to make a rather… strong first impression. The state he's in, he might just take one look at you and open fire. Besides, I'm more of an authority figure as far as he's concerned. He's always responded well to authority figures in the past. And before you ask, no I'm not going to use a force shield, and neither are you. He might think we didn't trust him.'
'Oh, we wouldn't want him to think that,' said Frost. 'Perish the thought. But if he makes one wrong move, I'm going to spatter him all over the bulkheads.'
'Let's try and be calm about this, Investigator. I don't want him killed. He's a pain in the ass, but he's good at his job. Good Security Officers are hard to come by. He's also one of the few people with firsthand experience on how to control the Grendel aliens. I'll decide when and if violence is necessary. Now, put on a nice smile. We don't want to frighten him.' Frost bared her teeth, and Silence winced. She looked as though she was about to bite him somewhere painful. 'All right, forget the smile. It doesn't suit you. Leave all the talking to me and don't get touchy about anything he says. I want to know what's reduced Stelmach to a state like this.'
Frost shrugged, but kept her hands ostentatiously away from her weapons. Silence decided to settle for that. He stepped forward into the corridor and walked through the open door to Stelmach's quarters. Frost stuck so close behind him he could feel her breath on the back of his neck. Silence smiled and nodded to Stelmach, who was sitting on the side of his bed, his head hanging down, his shoulders slumped in tiredness or defeat or both. His gun was lying on the floor, well out of his reach. Silence relaxed just a little and looked around.
The place was a mess. Everything that wasn't nailed down or an intrinsic part of the ship had been picked up and thrown at something else. The single table and chair had been overturned, and the shattered fragments of his more fragile personal belongings covered the floor, along with pretty much everything else. The bed folded down from the cabin wall, and had survived intact, but the bedclothes had been torn apart and strewn all over the small cabin. Stelmach was sitting on the bare bed, looking anything but dangerous, but Silence decided he was going to take it slowly anyway. He could sense Frost behind him, like an attack dog straining against a short leash. He stepped forward, and Stelmach finally looked up. His face was tired and drawn, and he looked ten years older.
'Come in, Captain, Investigator. Excuse the mess. It's the maid's day off.'
'I've seen worse,' said Silence. 'You've been very… busy, Stelmach. Any particular reason?'
'What does it matter?' said Stelmach. 'I know the regulations. I belong in the brig. Go ahead and take me. I'm finished.'
'I don't believe in sentencing someone until they've had a fair hearing,' said Silence carefully. 'Explain yourself. What brought this on?'
'It's private, Captain. Family business. I don't want to talk about it.'
'Talk anyway. If I'm going to lose the best Security Officer I've ever had, I want to know why.'
Stelmach looked past Silence's shoulder at Frost. 'Does she have to be here?'
'She's concerned for my safety,' said Silence. 'But she can step out into the corridor if you'd like.'
'No,' said Stelmach. 'I don't suppose it matters.' He leaned back against the bulkhead his bed folded down from, and his voice was very tired. 'I got a letter this morning. From my family. We've always been very close, ever since our father died when I was very young. There was a demonstration, some kind of political thing, and it turned ugly. Someone threw something, someone else opened fire, and my father the police officer was dead before he hit the ground. Mother brought us up, kept us together, did whatever was necessary to keep a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, food in our bellies. I was the youngest. Never wore new clothes in my life till I joined the Service. We were raised to revere my father as a saint and to have nothing at all to do with politics. She had all of us sign up for the Services, the moment we were old enough. There's always job security in the Services, whatever might be happening anywhere else.
'My sister Athena was the eldest. They took her away to become an Investigator when she was ten. We lost touch with her after that. My brothers Bold and Hero did well for themselves. Bold's a Major in the army, Hero's a Group leader in the Jesuit commandos. They write home regularly, send money when they can. I'm the only failure. My career's over. After the debacle on the Wolfling World I was lucky not to be executed, but I'll never be more than a Security Officer now, not even if I was officially exonerated. Even my work on controlling the Grendel aliens has been taken over by other people. As far as my family is concerned, I've disgraced them by being such a failure. My mother wrote to me, telling me not to come home again. She's expelled me from the family, disinherited me, and removed all references to me from the family history. She now tells everyone she only ever had two sons.
'I always did my best. Followed the regulations, did as I was told, tried hard to be a good soldier. Lived my live for the Empire. And what did it get me? A Security Officer's post on a ship passing time out on the Rim, going nowhere, doing nothing, or nothing that really matters. Do what you want to me. I don't care.'
He looked up suddenly, glaring at Silence and Frost. There were bright spots of color on his pale cheeks, and his eyes were puffy from crying but still sharp. 'I hate this ship. I hate you, too. Both of you. If I'd kept you under control like I was supposed to, things might have been different. But I let you reason with me, and the Investigator intimidate me, and it all went wrong. I hate my life, or what's left of it. And most of all I hate myself for being so weak. My mother said my father would spit on me if he could see what I've become, and I think she's right. He would have shown more courage, more… something. Sometimes he comes to me in my cabin, sits on the end of my bed in the early hours of the morning, and tells me he's ashamed of me. He looks young and sharp, just like in the holos taken before he was killed. I'm older now than he was then, but I'll always be a child to him. I can't stand these quarters anymore. I'm afraid to sleep. Put me in the brig. Or have the Investigator shoot me and put me out of my family's misery. She'd like that. I don't care. I don't care about anything anymore.'
He finally wound down, his head lowering bit by bit till he was staring at the floor again. He wasn't crying. He was too tired for that. Silence didn't know what to say. He'd read up on Stelmach's background, to try and find out why anyone would name their child Valiant, but the bare facts hadn't really made any sense till now. He felt ashamed and embarrassed at being so bluntly confronted with someone else's private pain and shame. These were the kinds of things you normally only told to your friends or loved ones, but as a Security Officer, Stelmach had no friends—and now he had no family either. That was why he'd wrecked his cabin. It was his way of letting the anger out, as well as a reason to be punished.
Silence didn't know what to do. He couldn't just have the man arrested and thrown in the brig, even if that was technically the correct thing to do. He wasn't Stelmach's friend, didn't even like the man, but he was a part of the
'Valiant, listen to me. We're your family now. This ship, this crew. You belong to us. If anyone's going to decide you're a failure, it'll be me, and I haven't made my mind up yet. You've survived when a lot of others didn't. And you were the first man ever to yoke a Grendel. They can't take that away from you. You're not a failure till I say you are. I'm your family and I'm your father, and the first thing I have to say to you is… clean up your room, boy.'
Stelmach looked at him, startled, and then burst into laughter. It was loud, healthy laughter, dispersing the gloom and doom that had filled the cabin, and Silence began to relax. He smiled at Frost, and though she didn't smile back, she seemed perhaps a little less cold and forbidding than she usually did. Stelmach's laughter began to die away, but before he could say anything, Silence's comm unit chimed in his ear. He gestured for Stelmach to wait a moment and opened a channel.
'This is Silence. It had better be important.'
'I'm afraid it is. Captain,' said the voice of his Second in Command. 'I think you'd better get back to the bridge. We have a situation up here.'
'What kind of situation?'
'Damned if I know, Captain. But I'll be a lot happier when you're back on the bridge. There's something… out there.'
The comm channel closed abruptly, leaving only the faintest hiss of static in Silence's ear. He broke off the connection and scowled, uneasy for no reason he could define. There had been something in his Second's voice… the man had almost sounded scared. Silence's first thought was an alien ship, but if that had been the case the Second would have said so. Hell, he'd have sounded a Red Alert by now. Silence's frown deepened as he looked at Frost and Stelmach, who were studying him expectantly.
'Forget this mess,' he said flatly. 'We're needed on the bridge. Move it.'
