Admiral's Trial (A Spineward Sectors Novel:) Page 5

  As he made his way towards his cabin, he had silently called the Commodore every vile name he could think of, but there were rare occasions when his utterances refused to remain silent. Doubtless, Jean Luc wanted Tremblay to charge into the Morale Officer’s office like a chump, waving a vibro-knife to slaughter the Commander in front of every surveillance system on the ship. In his quarters, Tremblay spat a gob of blood-tinged sputum on the floor. He had bitten his own lip so hard back in the ready room that it was still bleeding. Everyone thought he was a fool: Jason, Jean Luc, even Captain Heppner thought he was nothing more than a useful dim-witted-fool, to be cast aside as soon as he was no longer useful. But he would show them otherwise.

  He turned to the door of the adjoining cabin and, discovering it locked, he keyed in the override. Inside were the two lovebirds: Lisa Steiner and her boyfriend Mike. Lisa with her beaten, but much improved, face still resembled a raccoon. In surprise at his unannounced entrance, they reach for each other instinctively.

  With the sight of them together, he had to suppress a bit of jealousy. He wasn’t in love—or even infatuated—with the Com-Tech, but the truth was he had never had a girl. Jason had his Akantha, and this System Analyst had Miss Steiner. Half of Tremblay’s graduating classmates at the academy were married, or in committed relationships, but Tremblay himself was still quite alone. Of course, he had gone into the Intelligence Section with his eyes wide open. He forcibly reminded himself of that fact and directed his focus to his task. Deciding to take a page from Jason’s playbook, he waved his mutilated right arm in their faces.

  “How long before you break the encryption on those transmission files?” he demanded harshly.

  "I’m not sure, Lieutenant," Mike stammered, as the missing hand and blood-soaked uniform registered.

  Mike was the smartest of the pair so Tremblay wanted to put the fear of Parliament into him, and the image he struck at that moment certainly did that. Reluctantly, he turned and then waved his stump in Lisa Steiner’s face. “Well,” he demanded, whereby she leaned back in disgust at his missing extremity.

  “It takes as long as it takes,” Steiner replied, then demanded, “What happened to you?”

  “We don't have the time,” Tremblay declared, “and what happened isn't important right now.”

  “Why not, what's going on, Mr. Former Chief of Staff?” she glared back defiantly. “Why didn't you take this to the ship’s Intelligence Division?”

  He scowled and rounded on Mike, since he seemed to fear him more and appeared to grasp what was at stake.

  “Oh wait…that’s right; that would mean that what you’re trying to do might actually be a legitimate intelligence operation,” she added scornfully.

  “I’d redouble my efforts and try to put a muzzle on this one, if I were you,” Raphael sneered, speaking to Mike.

  “A muzzle!” she said hotly.

  “Easy, baby,” urged Mike cautiously, “I think there is a lot more going on than we know. The Lieutenant is the only thing keeping us out of the Brig right now.”

  “Hah!” she declared indignantly, but sat back down in her chair angrily.

  Tremblay gave himself a shake. Mike was the one he needed right now. Steiner’s usefulness had ended the moment she fingered her boyfriend as the one trying to decrypt the files. Mike understood the implications of the situation that much Tremblay could tell. Steiner, on the other hand, appeared oblivious to the dangers. If Tremblay were half the evil scud bucket Justin P. Suddian was, this would not be a problem. Unfortunately, rescuing damsels in distress seemed to have passed on to him like a virus. Blast Jason Montagne anyway! At least those he rescued actually seemed to like him, while Tremblay’s efforts merely ended in constant harping and nagging, along with accusations of betrayal.

  “Look, I’m as loyal to Jason Montagne and the Confederation Fleet as anyone on the ship,” he lied, hoping to bring some kind of unity into their little group. Jason Montagne could rot in prison for all I care, he thought, suppressing a sickening pang in his belly. I just suffered significant physical trauma, he reminded himself, it’s not surprising my stomach feels upset.

  “I don’t believe you,” Steiner said flatly.

  “Don’t be mad at me, just because I was more ideally placed to survive the…” his mouth felt slightly sour and he hesitated over the next word.

  “Go on and say it, I can see how much it hurts you,” she said, looking at him with her accusatory, raccoon eyes. Those eyes, set in such a cute little face, made her look more like some kind of little elf than a trained com-operator.

  “Mutiny,” Tremblay yelled, feeling a wave of nausea threaten to overcome him at the sound of the word. “Mutiny-mutiny-mutiny! There, are you happy? I said it: I survived Heppner’s mutiny, and came out of it better off than ninety nine percent of ‘our’ crew. I can't help what happened,” he said, putting as much passion and indignation into the fabrication as he could. “I did what I could to survive and be in a position do something if the opportunity arose.”

  “I believe him, Lisa,” Mike said suddenly, “he used to be second in line for command of this ship, and now that Captain Heppner and Commodore Jean Luc Montagne are here, he’s just another Junior Lieutenant. He’s lost more than he’s gained; why would he help put them in power, knowing the way they’d treat him and the rest of us!”

  “He might not have known that,” Steiner argued. “Besides, he’s a hard line parliamentarian; he might not care if they treat him like a green creeper and ‘vigorously interrogated’ the rest of us,” she declared. “Enhanced interrogation, my tush; by all that blazes, that was straight torture!”

  “Then why did he lie, covering for you with the Morale Officer just as soon as he found out you were working for the Admiral?” Mike asked, doing a better job of advocating for Tremblay, than Tremblay himself. “He got you out of there, Lisa. It just doesn’t make sense that he’s secretly working for them,”

  Steiner looked uncertain. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’m going to find out,” she flared, but Tremblay could sense the uncertainty. Work the asset, he reminded himself. Keep the asset focused and on your side. In this case, it meant playing the loyal ‘Little Admiral’ partisan.

  He did a double take as an idea occurred to him, then he smiled. That just might play. If these two spilled the beans regarding what he had already done, there was no way it would make things worse on him than they already were, so involving them a little further had very little downside. Plus, it might actually help build some trust.

  “Actually, we need to put aside what you’re doing,” Tremblay said firmly.

  “Why,” Steiner demanded, suspicion rampant in her voice.

  “I didn’t know if I could trust you before,” he gave Steiner a withering look, and she had the grace to look slightly red in the face, “but now, after hearing Mike speak, I do,” he said, trying to imitate Jason Montagne at his most pompous. He probably failed miserably but he had to keep going.

  “Go on,” Lisa prompted suspiciously.

  “Look, for your own safety I've had to keep you in the dark about a number of things, but I have to move fast on something and I need your help. For one thing, I've learned the Morale Officer is planning to start executing the former crew until their numbers fit within the available brig space,” he declared, making the entire thing up as he went along.

  Steiner gasped, and Mike paled.

  “You know he’s already put the Admiral in the hospital once,” Tremblay continued, throwing in some truth to make it more reasonable, just in case they hacked into the DI and tried to verify any part of his story. “Well, the word going around the Intelligence Section now is that he plans to torture the Admiral…and then kill him.” He failed to add that the Intelligence Section was a place he had not been to, since long before Captain Heppner retook the ship.

  The stricken looks on their faces almost made him pity them. Resisting the urge to gloat at how easy they were lapping this up, he tur
ned his face away to hide his own expression. He reminded himself that this was no laughing matter, and the Morale Officer really was the sort of person that gave Parliament a bad name and needed to die, regardless of what Jean Luc said.

  “What can we do,” demanded Lisa Steiner, looking intensely concerned for the first time since he had installed her into this cabin.

  “We’ll help, if it’s not too risky,” Mike added.

  Lisa rounded on him. “Our friends are dying, the Admiral needs our help, and you only want to help if it’s not too risky?” she asked him in disbelief.

  “We can’t throw our lives away for nothing, Lisa; we have to be smart,” he countered.

  “Our friends and fellow crew are nothing? The Admiral is nothing?!” she shouted.

  “The Admiral is the one that got us into this mess in the first place!” Mike retorted as his face turned red. “Pull your head out of the sand for half a minute, and look at things objectively. It’s his job to keep mutinies from happening in the first place, and if they do happen, he’s supposed to suppress them for the rest of us. He didn’t! He failed, Lisa!”

  “So you’re mad at the Admiral for trusting King James, Captain Heppner, and all the other new scum buckets that came with them?” she demanded, her face actually turning white with anger. “That’s enough reason for you to abandon the rest of the crew to the Morale Officer?”

  “That’s not what I said!” Mike protested.

  “Make it clear,” she flared.

  Tremblay decided this was the perfect time to rejoin the conversation. “Look, you guys won’t even have to go outside your rooms; all I need is a fancy piece of computer code work. A hack to make it look like Suddian’s assistant, Mr. Eden, left one of the cell doors unlocked; I can take care of the rest,” he said with more confidence than he actually felt.

  “I can do that,” Mike replied, relief written all over his face.

  Lisa glared at the two them for a moment before turning to stare at the wall with her arms crossed.

  The last thing Tremblay needed was the pair of them fighting to the point that one of them felt the urge to go outside to blow off some steam.

  “What I’ll need from you, Lisa,” he continued, trying to project the ringing tone of command, “is an encrypted com-link powerful enough to transmit to the rest of the brig.”

  She turned around and stared at him as though he were the class dunce. “Impossible,” she said flatly.

  “What?” he asked, his timing thrown off by her early refutation of his plan.

  “The brig is designed to be impervious to outside transmissions that don’t run through hard lines,” she explained shortly. At Tremblay’s blank expression, she rolled her eyes before adding, “That means nothing can transmit out either.”

  “Okay,” he said, trying to buy a few seconds to collect his thoughts.

  “You’d need to put in a pair of signal boosters,” she continued animatedly, clearly thinking aloud, “but any booster powerful enough to cut through the reinforced bulkheads would be spotted by a basic security scan.”

  “Blast,” Tremblay cursed, trying to project disappointment. The truth was that it had been a weak idea to begin with.

  Apparently, Lisa Steiner had not yet conceded, as her eyes lit up. “But if we put a weak booster somewhere near the entrance to the brig, and another one in a lift car,” she said excitedly, “then whenever that car stopped at the Brig, it would send a message for the other booster to activate. That would be almost undetectable, except during transmission.”

  Tremblay looked at her with narrowed eyes. “You seem to have quite the knack for Intelligence work,” he said finally.

  “I’ve just been studying communications ever since school,” she sniffed, as if the very idea she would have anything to do with Intelligence work was equal parts poor taste and absurdity.

  “All right, you lot should work on your end. I’ve a few other tasks to perform,” Tremblay said grimly, as he realized this was going to take some careful planning. Talking with these two had only made him realize how difficult this was going to be. Physically pulling it off was going to be hard enough…doing it without being caught was going to be considerably more difficult.

  He needed some help to do what he had in mind, and it was going to have to come from one of the most unlikely allies he could imagine.

  Chapter 6: A Communicator for Revenge

  “I have no idea why I should accept your proposal to smuggle in a communicator to my dear cousin languishing in durance vile,” Bethany scoffed, her face a mask of pleasant rejection while her voice itself came across as the sneer it was.

  “You don’t find the possibility of raising his hopes of escape, only to crush them underneath your heels, reason enough?” Tremblay asked, taken aback.

  “Why put myself at risk when all I have to do is simply sit here and watch? I can content myself in the knowledge that he is suffering far worse than anything I could ever do to him,” the Princess-Cadet challenged with a cocked eyebrow.

  “Huh,” Tremblay said, feeling stumped. He sat back in the guest chair of her room to consider the situation. Perhaps he was going to have to give up the idea of smuggling a communicator down to Jason. He calculated the odds of it actually being used at about forty percent, due to the complications of transmitting through the brig’s security, even using a constantly moving lift car like Lisa Steiner’s plan called for. He did have to try though, at least to satisfy those dratted little Royalists squirreled away in his cabin.

  His eyes drifted to the stump of his missing hand, and Tremblay observed the Princess-Cadet looking at him through slitted eyes. She looked more like a cat than anything else, one who was trying to decide whether to stay aloof or give chase to a pesky mouse and his mental antennae pricked up.

  “I really don’t see how any of this is worth my while,” Bethany said after a short pause, looking at him sideways.

  “How can I sweeten the pot?” Tremblay asked through narrowed eyes.

  “Perhaps…” she hesitated, then shook her head, “no. Never mind.”

  “What?” Tremblay asked, making an urgent gesture. Realizing he had unconsciously used his stump he quickly lowered it and cleared his throat, “Please, go on.”

  “Just something to sweeten the pot,” she said demurely, and on the inside Tremblay scoffed—this woman was anything but demure. “If I’m to take such a big risk of being discovered…this is the Brig, and I would be walking into the lion’s mouth so to speak.”

  “If I can,” Tremblay allowed cautiously.

  “The only way the guards won’t be suspicious of my visit is if I give them a reason they can understand for wanting to visit my cousin. A reason that can’t at all be construed as some kind of assistance,” Bethany smiled cruelly.

  “I don’t see that as a problem,” Tremblay said after a considered pause.

  “In addition, I need something done about my living arrangements here,” Bethany said imperiously.

  Tremblay’s heart surged with the desire to tell this pampered royal exactly what she could do with her imperious nature, but mindful that he still needed her if he was going to throw off the scent of any trackers he bit his tongue and reluctantly nodded.

  “I can see about getting the armed crewmen removed from your doors, although I can’t make any promises,” Tremblay said finally.

  Bethany looked at him in disbelief, “Remove them? Are you a fool? I want them replaced!” Bethany looked at him like he was an idiot—or a bug. “I would prefer a quad of marines.”

  “Wha—whatever for?” Tremblay said in surprise.

  “A pair of armed crewmen, parliamentary crewmen might get it in their head to ‘get some of their own back,’ and come into my room at some point to exact their plebian revenge,” Bethany explained, shaking her head and rolling her eyes in clear annoyance. “If I’m going to help you, I want guards—trained guards I don’t have to worry about. Caprian Marines are some of the most professional m
en in the services and highly trained in close quarters combat; no one will bother me with them on my heels.”

  Getting the Princess-Cadet’s guard upgraded was an entirely different kettle of fish from getting it removed. Tremblay disliked her insinuations against the common man, in the person of her crew guards, but he had to reluctantly admit that that the Royal family had more than earned the common man’s disregard.

  “I think something along those lines can be worked out,” Tremblay said with a nod. Finally, he had found a spot of luck. He hated throwing things together on the fly, but it could not be helped. That made everything a lot messier than he would have liked, but having the Princess-Cadet go down to the Brig to give Jason the communicator instead of himself would not only throw the Morale Officer off his scent, it would help muddy the waters if there was some sort of investigation later on. “I am the Commodore’s Flag Lieutenant. A suggestion here, a carefully worded remark there, and pretty soon you should have your guard upgraded.”

  “Excellent, Lieutenant Tremblay,” Bethany said with a stiff, royal nod. If she was not such a stuck up royalist pig, Tremblay would almost have been tempted to view her as the beautiful woman she was. The royal house might not have gotten much right, but genetically engineering physical beauty into even their cadet branches wasn’t one of their many mistakes. Now, if only they could breed for better personalities, the elected order might actually have some competition for the love of the people.

  “Not a single extra guard until your task is complete,” Tremblay warned, giving her a significant look.

  “Oh I don’t think that will be a problem. So long as you can put me on the approved list for the Brig,” Bethany cooed, her eyes already gazing into the distance. The look of glee which crossed her face, at the thought of going down into the Brig to ‘visit’ her cousin, almost made Tremblay shiver.

  As it was, he took some small comfort in the fact that whatever she managed to convince the guards to let her do to the former Admiral, Jason Montagne probably deserved it.