“Oh, I have the same feeling,” Philbrick replies. “We’ve had the squad comms running since we docked. You be careful, too.”
“Come on, Dmitry,” I say. “I gotta drop you off at your berth before I go down there.”
Dmitry shrugs and turns to follow me.
We leave the SI troopers behind and walk down the passageway toward the elevator. For a moment, I feel like turning back and asking Staff Sergeant Philbrick for his sidearm. I’m exhausted and anxious, and I’ve never felt less prepared for trouble than I do right now.
CHAPTER 10
When I step through the hatch of the NCO mess, the room is largely empty except for the two strangers that are sitting at the table closest to the food counter. One of them is a civilian, a slightly round-faced man with a balding head and old-fashioned eyeglasses. Everything about him screams “bureaucrat.” He’s wearing blue overalls like the civilian yard apes do, but his look like they just came out of the bag at the issue station. Underneath, he’s wearing a dark red high-collared suit, the kind fashionable among Earthside government functionaries and newscasters.
The man next to him is a military officer, and he looks nothing like a bureaucrat. He’s in standard fleet-issue CDU fatigues, the new blue-and-gray camouflage pattern they started issuing only last year. He’s wearing the shoulder boards of a major, a silver oak wreath with one four-sided star in it, and a name tape that identifies him as “CARTER.” He studies me with hard gray eyes as I step into the room, and I take an instant dislike to him. I stop in front of the table where the two are sitting and render a cursory salute just barely on the right side of insubordination. These people are intruders on this ship. They don’t belong to the crew with whom I’ve risked my life for the last month, and I don’t like seeing them holding court in the one spot on the ship where the noncoms can relax and socialize occasionally.
“Staff Sergeant Grayson reporting as ordered,” I say to the major, ignoring the civilian entirely. The major nods to an empty chair in front of the table.
“Sit, Staff Sergeant.”
I sit down and study the major’s uniform as the civilian next to him starts to tap away on a data pad in his hands. The uniform is correct, technically speaking—clean CDUs, proper rank sleeves, a midnight-blue fleet beret tucked underneath the left shoulder board, everything crisp and sharp and according to dress regs. But there’s only a name tape on his chest above the right breast pocket. There’s no specialty badge, no combat drop wings, nothing at all that lets me deduce the major’s service branch within the fleet. The spots on the upper arms where the unit and organizational patches ought to be are just blank stickythread squares. The major sitting in front of me is as generic a fleet staff officer as it gets.
“This meeting is classified,” the civilian says without preamble or introduction. “You are not authorized to share any details of this conversation with anyone not in the room at present. Please place your PDP on the table before we proceed.”
“May I ask who you are?” I ask the civilian. “I don’t see any ID or rank sleeves on you.”
“Place your PDP on the table as requested,” the major says. “You see my rank sleeves, don’t you?”
“I do,” I confirm. “And I don’t know who you are, either, sir. What fleet branch are you? I see no unit patch.”
The major looks at me and then flashes a curt and humorless smile.
“Logistics,” he says. “But it’s not me you need to play nice with. It’s this gentleman over here.”
The civilian takes a credentials folder out of his overalls without looking away from his data pad screen. He flips it open and flashes a holographic badge and ID card at me.
“I am Special Agent Green. I’m with the Commonwealth Security Service. Please comply with my requests without delay, or things are going to get unfriendly.”
I look at his credentials. I’ve never seen a CSS badge before, so for all I know he could be showing me a merchandise voucher for the government commissary in Halifax, but it looks authentic enough.
“CSS is civilian. This is a military ship. You have no jurisdiction here. You got a beef with me, I should be talking to the master-at-arms or Fleet Investigative Service.”
Special Agent Green exchanges a look with Major Carter and smiles thinly. “Oh, boy,” he says. “Another latrine lawyer.” He nods over to the nearest bulkhead. “You are docked at Independence Station. Independence is a civilian facility. I can assure you that we have jurisdiction on civilian facilities. But I didn’t call you down here to debate the coarse points of Commonwealth law with an E-6.”
He looks at his data pad again and flicks through a few screens with his finger. “When Indianapolis did its slingshot burn around Mars, were you in armor, Sergeant Grayson?”
“Well, let’s think about this,” I say. “Periapsis approach to a Lanky-held world, right past several Lanky seed ships. Of course I was wearing armor. Everyone was in a vacsuit.”
“Yes or no would be sufficient, Staff Sergeant Grayson.” Special Agent Green looks up from his data pad again and gives me a thin-lipped smile. “Go ahead and assume that you don’t need to impress me with your cleverness or your toughness.”
“I don’t feel the need to impress you,” I say. “I’m just a lowly E-6. You said it yourself. Why are you talking to me right now? We just ran the blockade past Mars. There’s a hundred shipwrecks floating out there. Did the skipper tell you we have thirty thousand people waiting for us to get back to Fomalhaut and show them a way back home?”
“Fomalhaut,” Agent Green says. “Yeah, I read the logs. That’s why you’re sitting here.”
He consults his data pad again. I suppress the sudden urge to rip it out of his hands and cram it down his throat. A hundred of our ships gone, millions dead on Mars, tens of thousands waiting for news on New Svalbard. Why are we wasting time with this right now?
“You took part in a bona fide mutiny on New Svalbard. You disobeyed direct orders from the task force commander and shot it out with fellow troops. I’m still sifting through the details, but from where I’m sitting, I’ve already tallied up twenty-five years in Leavenworth, Staff Sergeant Grayson.”
“They were illegal orders,” I say.
“Not your call to make. You’re an E-6. You’re a combat grunt, not a JAG officer.”
“That was my call to make,” I say. “First thing you learn in NCO school is to never give an order that you know won’t be followed. Second thing you learn is that you have the right to refuse illegal orders. The task force commander had no right to use us to claim civilian assets by force.”
“Be sure to bring that up at your court-martial,” Major Carter says.
“I will,” I say. “And I’ll also bring up how you people exiled two battalions of Earthside grunts on a colony with almost no resources, and then turned off the FTL network.”
Agent Green gives me his brief, thin-lipped smile again. “Two battalions,” he says, aping my tone of voice. “Five thousand troops.”