The airlock opened. Kat stepped through, wearing a basic uniform. William relaxed, slightly. He’d half expected her to wear her dress uniform. That would have been embarrassing, if only because Asher Dales had no dress uniform. The planetary defense force hadn’t grown large enough to allow inexperienced sadists to claim positions of power. And whoever had designed the Royal Navy’s dress uniform was very definitely a sadist.
He studied Kat for a long moment as she saluted the flag. Dear God . . . what had happened to her? Her face looked the same, but there was a . . . beaten air around her that worried him more than he cared to admit. He knew that she’d taken Pat Davidson’s death badly, yet . . . He winced, inwardly. Kat had lost her father and fiancé in the same month. No wonder she was depressed. And leaving the command deck probably hadn’t helped. She’d been a great commanding officer.
“Welcome aboard,” he said, saluting. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Likewise,” Kat said. She sounded tired. “You didn’t change the dedication plaque?”
William glanced at the plaque, which still read HMS DANDELION. “It didn’t seem as important as getting the ships into space and into service,” he said as he invited Kat to follow him to his office. Tanya fell in behind them. “Besides, Asher Dales hasn’t agreed on a formal ship prefix, let alone anything else. I imagine the ships will be renamed at some point in the future.”
“Probably,” Kat agreed. “You did a good job.”
“With the ships or with the battle?” William grinned at her. “We tried.”
Kat smiled back, tiredly. “Both, I suppose,” she said. “But the battle in particular.”
“It would have gone the other way if they’d come in firing,” William said. He’d done everything in his power to make that clear to the planetary government, although he wasn’t sure they’d believed him. Victory was better than defeat, of course, but it had a nasty habit of going to one’s head. “They might have been able to inflict serious damage on the planet even if we had destroyed them.”
“They didn’t, thankfully,” Kat said. Her expression darkened. “Judd will need years to recover.”
William said nothing as they stepped into his cabin. The reports had been vague and outdated, but the planet had clearly taken a beating. Years of work had been smashed back to bedrock. It was quite possible that the locals wouldn’t have the grit and determination to rebuild, even after the enemy force was destroyed. He’d been on planets that had lost the will to live. They were not pleasant places to visit. He hated to imagine what it might be like to live there.
“Please, take a seat,” he said, waving towards the sofa. It was yet another unessential item he hadn’t bothered to have replaced. Kat, at least, wouldn’t be upset that he hadn’t covered the frame in gold and replaced the navy-issue cushions with silk. “Would you care for a glass of the local vintage?”
“Just a glass,” Kat said. She sat on the sofa and crossed her legs. “What did you pull out of the wreckage?”
“Very little, so far,” William said. He poured three glasses of wine and passed them around, then took a chair himself. Tanya remained standing, her face utterly impassive. “The datacores were quite badly damaged by the engagement. We haven’t even started to untangle them, if indeed it’s possible. Your experts might be able to do a better job.”
And Asher Dales won’t be blamed if they fail to pull anything from the datacores, he added silently. Kat would understand that, sometimes, it simply wasn’t possible to recover data, but her political masters might not be quite so understanding. Better to let someone else take the blame.
He studied Kat, feeling oddly uneasy. She still looked young—if she’d been born on Hebrides, he would have said she was in her midtwenties—but the way she held herself suggested she was an old woman trapped in a young woman’s form. And yet, she wasn’t that old. Kat was in her late thirties. She still had years ahead of her. But she’d lost too much over the last year. She deserved much better.
“We did examine the bodies,” he said, putting the thought aside for later consideration. “Of the fifty-one corpses pulled from the wreck, forty-five of them were almost certainly from Ahura Mazda. They had the usual lack of genetic enhancements, as far as anyone can tell; the remainder appear to have come from somewhere else. We just don’t know where.”
Kat’s lips thinned. “Converts or traitors?”
“Or merely pirates out for a good time,” William said. He didn’t think that any pirates would willingly join the Theocrats, but he’d been wrong before. “It’s also possible that they were conscripts. The Theocrats presumably need people to help keep their ships running.”
“We know they took people from Judd,” Kat agreed. “And they’d take people from here too, if they had the chance.”
William nodded. “I’ve ordered my people to carry weapons at all times,” he said. “But I don’t know how it will work out.”
“At least they’ll have a chance to resist capture,” Kat said.
Or kill themselves before they can be captured, William told himself grimly. No one wants to fall into enemy hands.
Kat cleared her throat. “Do you remember when we were sent out to raid enemy territory?”
“Yes,” William said. The irony wasn’t lost on him. “And now they’re doing the same thing to you.”
Kat
