The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (24 page)

              “Probably not,” she shook her head. “But I suspect you can.”

              For the first time since he entered the room, a ghost of a smile touched Templeton’s face.

              Staples was tempted to approach her pilot in her natural habitat. She thought that the hydroponics bay would make her more apt to open up, but she couldn’t take the chance that someone would walk in on them. The bay was public space on the ship, and though few went there apart from the waifish young woman, the conversation was too important to leave to chance. She thought that calling Bethany to her cabin would terrify her, and she might assume that her captain had figured out her crime, panic, and do something stupid. In the end, Staples decided to go knocking on her door after her shift ended.

              Bethany’s cabin was one deck down from her own, though in all the time that Bethany had been on the ship, Staples had never had cause to go there. Now that she had, she wondered what the room would look like. It took only a few seconds for the occupant to answer. She was already dressed for bed, swimming in an oversized long-sleeved black tee shirt and checkered flannel pajama bottoms. Her makeup was still on, and her darkened eyes widened appreciably when they fell upon her captain.

              “Hi Bethany. May I come in?” Staples tried to keep it light, but she guessed the other woman’s heartbeat had just picked up considerably. Bethany nodded and stepped aside.

              The room, though it was the same as Staples’ in size, seemed smaller for all its clutter. One wall and the ceiling were covered in posters, some depicting black-clad rock bands, their faces obscured under layers of makeup, while others displayed classical and new pieces of art. Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” abutted Xinui’s “Dire Girl”. There were few pieces of open wall left. Staples recalled that Bethany rarely left the ship when in port, and wondered when she had accumulated all of her wall art. Her bed was disheveled and a sketch pad lay open on top of the messy sheets. Pillows were stacked atop the mattress and against the wall. A makeshift wooden shelf for plants was evidently designed to hold leafy visitors from the hydroponics bay, and two lilacs rested, lightly secured, on the stained surface. Staples noted that the shelf was nicely finished and wondered if Bethany had bought it or if a fellow crew member had made it for her. If so, she suspected she knew who.

              Staples closed the door gently and indicated one of the two chairs that stood on either side of the table. The other was covered in discarded clothing; evidently, she was not used to visitors. “May I sit down?” Again, she nodded. “Won’t you join me?” Bethany sat on the clothing and looked at her captain, wide-eyed and demure.

              Staples took a deep breath and collected her thoughts before beginning. “Bethany, I want you to listen to me very carefully. I know.” She paused a moment to let that sink in. Her interlocutor sat motionless in the other chair facing her, her hands clasped in her lap. Staples was at least relieved to see the dark brown eyes were on her and not the table or the floor, as she had expected they would be. “I know you tried to kill Parsells and Quinn.” She paused again to measure the other woman for a reaction, but there was nothing outwardly visible. “I want you to tell me why.”

              The moment stretched, and Staples was just about to give up on getting an answer when Bethany spoke. The voice was light and reedy as usual, but not whispered. In fact, Staples thought she had rarely heard the girl speak with so much conviction. “They deserved it.”

              “That’s not for you to decide. That’s my job. I decide justice on my ship.” Her voice was firmer than she intended, but it was just as well. The pilot’s future depended on her understanding of this point.

              “Has that ever happened to you?” Bethany replied almost immediately.

              Staples had not expected to be challenged in that manner. She shook her head. “No.”

              “Well it has to me.” Her voice was rising. “Over and over. And if it hasn’t happened to you, you don’t get to decide, because you don’t know!” The captain found herself taken aback. She had come here to put this crew member in her place, to remind her of the way things worked, but she found herself on the defensive.

              “Bethany, I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry something terrible happened to you. But there’s a reason that judges and magistrates don’t know, mustn’t know the people they are judging. It’s so that they are capable of being unbiased. People who have been wronged have trouble being objective.” This was an age old argument, and one that Staples thoroughly believed in, and yet, as she sat across from this woman who had been terribly wronged, it sounded weak and hollow.

              “But you know your crew, and you still judge them. You’re biased,” Bethany objected. She wasn’t yelling, but her voice was still strong and full of conviction. “If you had the people who killed Yegor here, would you be as unbiased as some judge or magistrate?”

              “Bethany, Yegor wasn’t killed. His death was an accident.” Before she could object, Staples raised her palm. “But I understand what you mean. If I had those people who cut a hole in my ship and dragged my crew member and my passenger out into space here… I guess I wouldn’t be objective. I would try to be, but I suppose I would fail simply because I’m human.”

              “Maybe you would be the best person to judge them,” Bethany challenged her.

              “Maybe,” the captain speculated. “But I’ll say this. I suspect that I would treat people who did that to another ship differently than the people who did that to mine. So it’s not fair. Some people have always argued that criminals should be turned over to their victims, but I’m not here to debate that.” She felt that she had to regain control of this conversation. “I am here because I need you to know that what you did was wrong. I don’t know if it was morally wrong. That’s up to you to decide. But it was wrong for you to attempt to kill people on my ship. That is up to me to decide. This is my ship, and in the end, that means I make the rules. I need you to understand that if you’re going to stay here.”

              Bethany’s brows knitted together in confusion. “Stay here?” she asked in little more than a whisper. “Aren’t you going to turn me in?”

              “I would hardly have cut a deal with Piotr to cover your crime if I had. Oh, I’ve thought about it. I really have. I just don’t know what good it would do. I do know that prison would kill you, and I think you’ve been through enough hell in your life.”

              Bethany looked at her suspiciously. “Did Dinah tell you…?” She let the sentence drift off.

              It was Staples’ turn to shake her head. “Dinah didn’t tell me anything. If you’ve chosen her for a confidant, then you’ve chosen well. But now you’re going to need another one: me.”

              The suspicious look was replaced with confusion.

              “Here’s the deal I’m offering, and it’s not open for negotiation. First, I need to hear from you, with utter conviction, that you will never challenge my authority on a matter like this again. I don’t care what your reasons are. You cannot do something like this again. If you can’t convince me of that, then there’s no point in my continuing to speak.”

              Bethany thought, really thought it seemed, for nearly a minute. Finally, she nodded and looked Staples in the eye. “I promise. I’ll do anything to stay on this ship. I wanted those men dead. I still do.” Staples watched her small hands briefly curl into fists in her lap. “But I need to trust you. Taking care of bad men is your job, not mine. I’m sorry.” This was more even than Staples was hoping for, and that made it just barely enough.

              “Okay, I believe you. Second, for the rest of this job, you stay confined to quarters,” she saw the young woman tense, “or the hydroponics bay.” The tension eased. “Which we might as well designate as your quarters anyway. Third, and this may be the most difficult for you, we start bi-weekly therapy sessions.” The look she got was a combination of confusion and skepticism she had seen before. “I don’t have a psychologist onboard, nor do I intend to hire one, but you need to talk about what happened to you and what you’re going through. You can talk to whomever you like, Dinah if that works for you, but you will also need to talk to me. I’m no psychologist, but I’ve been through my share of troubles, and I am a good listener. And when I say talk, I don’t mean sit in a chair full of sullen hostility waiting for the hour to pass. I mean you talk, openly and willingly. No matter how hard it is, you try. You said you would do anything to stay on this ship? That’s the condition. You deal with this toxicity before it kills you… or anyone else.”

              Bethany thought this over for a shorter time before acquiescing. “All right.”

              “Are you sure? It’s easy to say you’ll do it. It’s not so easy to actually do it.”

              “If it’s you, Captain… yes.” She looked over at her lilacs, then back in Staples’ brown eyes. “I will try really hard, but please be patient with me.”

              She nodded thoughtfully. “As long as you’re giving me your all, I will be. We can start now.”

              Bethany did a very good imitation of a deer caught in headlights.

              “Why don’t you tell me how you learned to fly?”

              Charis knocked on the door of the ReC as she pulled it open, then looked down into the room. From her vantage point above her, she could see Dinah standing at one of the control panels, her hands on the surface currently attached to it. The grey tank top she wore complemented her muscular silhouette, and she did not look up at the woman who leaned in from the hatch above.

              “Can I come in, Dinah?” Charis ventured when the engineer did not answer.

              “This isn’t my room,” she replied flatly. Charis took that to mean that she was free to do as she liked, so she swung down from the bulkhead and clambered down the recessed rungs in the floor-made-wall, being careful to close the door above her. When she reached the bottom, she made a bit of a show of straightening her white tee shirt and pushing her hair back from her face. If she hoped that Dinah would use the time to turn around and face her, she was disappointed.

              “Can I talk to you?” She felt the idiocy of the statement. She was already talking to her, and again, the ReC wasn’t Dinah’s room. She was free to do as she wished. The woman had a way of making her feel foolish, even useless, and as much as she respected her, she was tempted to tell her to forget it and climb back the way she had come. Instead, she closed her eyes and counted to ten, hoping that Dinah would answer and make this easier. When the answer didn’t come, she opened her eyes and found the other woman was indeed giving her her undivided attention. She had turned around, and though she was leaning back against the control panel, she was staring at Charis with a focus that she thought might unnerve the devil. They were perhaps a meter apart, and now that she had the other woman’s full attention, she was not so sure that she wanted it. It was moments like this that made her understand why her daughter was afraid of the woman. She forced herself to proceed.

              “I wanted to thank you. For helping Evelyn.” Dinah opened her mouth to reply, but Charis forged ahead. “I know that you don’t like being thanked in public. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered, but I wanted to say it, so I waited to catch you until you were alone.” She looked away, aware that she was rambling but feeling unable to stop. “Actually, I might have used that excuse to put this off a little bit, but we’re only two days out from Saturn now, and I really do want to thank you.” She paused. It was evident Dinah was going to wait until she was well and truly finished before replying. “So thank you,” she added, quite redundantly.

              The other woman waited a good ten seconds to speak. Finally, she said, “You’re welcome, I suppose, but I didn’t do it for you. Why do you care?”

              “Why do I care about Evelyn?” she stammered, unsure how to answer.

              “Why do you care enough about her to make a special trip to the ReC to thank me? I hadn’t realized that you two were friends.” Charis suspected that Dinah knew that she and Evelyn were not friends, had barely spoken since she had been awakened.

              “We’re not, not really. I mean, I like her fine. She’s beautiful.” She shook herself to stop herself from babbling again, and instead focused on what she wanted to say. “I wanted to thank you because I know that you would do the same thing for me, or for John, or for Gwen.”

              “Ah. Then you’re welcome.”

              Charis cast around the room for something to look at to avoid the other woman’s gaze. “The way you take care of this crew, Dinah, it’s amazing.” She forced herself to look back in those intense dark brown eyes. “But it’s not just crew to me. This is my family here, on this ship. And I’m really glad you’re here.”

              Dinah said nothing, but she nodded once, deeply, whether in understanding or gratitude, she didn’t know. Charis even thought she detected the hint of a smile.

              “Can I ask one more thing?” Charis decided to press her luck.

              “Go ahead.”

              “How did you know? That Parsells and Quinn were… what they were doing, or trying to do?”

              For the first time since she had turned around to face the navigator, Dinah looked away for a moment as she considered. “Templeton asked me to take a look at them when they came on board. I did, and I didn’t like what I saw. They must have bought alcohol when we stopped on Mars, and that’s when they started drinking. They hid it well, mostly, but that night they were drunk. So I kept an eye on their whereabouts.”