At last, moved by an obscure impulse, he fetched a basin, water, and a cloth, and washed the dried blood from the mercenary's face.
So this is the terror, he thought, that motivates those crazy massacres of witnesses one reads about. I understand them now. I liked it better when I didn't.
He drew his dagger and trimmed the trailing wires from the silver button, and pressed it carefully back into place on the pilot officer's temple. After, until Daum came looking for him with some request for orders, he stood and meditated on the still, waxen features of the thing they'd made. But reason seemed to run backwards, conclusions swallowed in premises, and premises in silence, until in the end only silence and the unanswerable object remained.
CHAPTER TEN
Miles gestured the injured mercenary captain ahead of him into sickbay with a little jab of his nerve disruptor. The deadly weapon seemed unnaturally light and easy in his hand. Something that lethal should have more heft, like a broadsword. Wrong, for murder to be so potentially effortless—one ought to at least have to grunt for it.
He would have felt happier with a stunner, but Bothari had insisted that Miles present a front of maximum authority when moving prisoners about. 'Saves argument,' he'd said.
The miserable Captain Auson, with two broken arms, nose a swollen blot on his face, did not look very argumentative. But the cat-like tension and calculating flicks of glance of Auson's first officer, the Betan hermaphrodite Lieutenant Thorne, reconciled Miles to Bothari's reasoning.
He found Bothari leaning with deceptive casualness against a wall within, and the mercenaries' frazzledlooking medtech preparing for her next customers. Miles had deliberately saved Auson for last, and toyed with a pleasantly hostile fantasy of ordering the Captain's arms, when set, immobilized in some anatomically unlikely position.
Thorne was seated to have a cut over one eye sealed, and to receive an injection against stunner-induced migraine. The lieutenant sighed as the medication took effect, and looked at Miles with less squinting curiosity. 'Who the hell are you people, anyway?'
Miles arranged his mouth in what he hoped would be taken for a smile of urbane mystery, and said nothing.
'What are you going to do with us?' Thorne persisted.
Good question, he thought. He had returned to Cargo Hold #4 to find their first batch of prisoners well along to having one of the bulkheads apart and escape manufactured. Miles voiced no objection when Bothari prudently had them all stunned again for transport to the Ariel's brig. There, Miles found, the chief engineer and her assistants had nearly managed to sabotage the magnetic locks in their cells. Miles rather desperately had them all stunned again.
Bothari was right; it was an intrinsically unstable situation. Miles could hardly keep the whole crew stunned for a week or more, crammed in their little prison, without doing them serious physiological damage. Miles's own people were spread too thinly, manning both ships, guarding the prisoners around the clock—and fatigue would soon multiply error. Bothari's murderous and final solution had a certain logic to it, Miles supposed. But his eye fell on the silent sheeted form of the mercenary pilot officer in the corner of the room, and he shivered inwardly. Not again. He suppressed jittering panic at his abruptly enlarged troubles, and angled for time.
'It would be a favor to Admiral Oser to put you out now and let you walk home,' he answered Thorne. 'Are they all like you out there?'
Thorne said stonily. 'The Oserans are a free coalition of mercenaries. Most captains are Captain- owners.'
Miles swore, genuinely surprised. 'That's not a chain of command. That's a damned committee.'
He stared curiously at Auson. A shot of pain killer was at last unlocking the big man's attention from his own body, and he glowered back. 'Is your crew sworn to you, then, or to Admiral Oser?' Miles asked him.
'Sworn? I hold the contracts of everybody on my ship, if that's what you mean,' Auson growled. 'Everybody.' He frowned at Thorne, whose nostrils grew pinched.
'My ship,' corrected Miles. Auson's mouth rippled in a silent snarl and he glared at the nerve disruptor but, as Bothari had predicted, did not argue. The medtech laid the deposed captain's arm in a brace, and began working over it with a surgical hand tractor. Auson paled, and became more withdrawn. Miles felt a slight twinge of empathy.
'You are, without a doubt, the sorriest excuse for soldiers I have seen in my career,' Miles declaimed, trolling for reactions. One corner of Bothari's mouth twitched, but Miles ignored that one. 'It's a wonder you're all still alive. You must choose your foes very carefully.' He rubbed his own still-aching stomach, and shrugged. 'Well, I know you do.'
Auson flushed a dull red, and looked away. 'Just trying to stir up a little action. We've been on this damned blockade duty a frigging year.'
'Stir up action,' Thorne muttered disgustedly. 'You would.'
I have you now. The certainty reverberated like a bell in Miles's mind. His idle dreams of revenge upon the mercenary captain vaporized in the heat of a new and more breathtaking inspiration. His eye nailed Auson, and he rapped out sharply, 'How long has it been since your last General Fleet Inspection?'
Auson looked as if it had belatedly occurred to him that he ought to be limiting this conversation to names, ranks, and serial numbers, but Thorne replied, 'A year and a half.'
Miles swore, with feeling, and raised his chin aggressively. 'I don't think I can take any more of this. You're going to have one now.'
Bothari maintained an admirable stillness, against the wall, but Miles could feel his eyes boring through his shoulderblades with his sharpest what-the-hell-are-you-doing-now look. Miles did not turn.
'What the hell,' said Auson, echoing Bothari's silence, 'are you talking about? Who are you? I had you pegged for a smuggler for sure, when you let us shake you down without a squeak, but I'll swear we didn't miss—' he surged to his feet, causing Bothari's disruptor to snap to the aim. His voice edged upward in frustration. 'You are a smuggler, damn it! I can't be that wrong. Was it the ship itself? Who'd want it? What the hell are you smuggling?' he cried plaintively.
Miles smiled coldly. 'Military advisors.'
He fancied he could see the hook of his words set in the mercenary captain and his lieutenant. Now to run in the line.
Miles began inspection, with some relish, in the sickbay itself, since he was fairly sure of his ground there. At disruptor point, the medtech produced her official inventory and began turning out drawers under Miles's intent eye. With a sure instinct Miles focused first on drugs capable of abuse, and immediately turned up some nicely embarrassing discrepancies.
Next was equipment. Miles itched to get to the cryogenic chamber, but his sense of showmanship held it for last. There were enough other breakdowns. Some of his grandfather's more acerbic turns of phrase, suitably edited, had turned the medtech's face to chalk by the time they arrived at the piece de resistance.
'And just how long has this chamber been out of commission, Medtech?'
'Six months,' she muttered. 'The repairs engineer kept saying he'd get to it,' she added defensively at Miles's frown and raised eyebrows.
'And you never thought to stir him up? Or more properly, ask your superior officers to do so?'
'It seemed like there was plenty of time. We haven't used—'
'And in that six months your captain never once even ran an in-house inspection?'
'No, sir.'
Miles swept Auson and Thorne with a gaze like a dash of cold water, then let his eye deliberately linger on the covered form of the dead man. 'Time ran out for your pilot officer.'
'How did he die?' asked Thorne, sharply, like a sword thrust.
Miles parried with a deliberate misunderstanding. 'Bravely. Like a soldier.' Horribly, like an animal sacrifice,