Eclipse by K A Bedford

Author:K A Bedford [Bedford, K A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781894063784
Publisher: Hades Publications Inc
Published: 2011-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

I was holding my brush so tightly it broke. I threw the pieces across the corridor. They clattered against a Service gray emergency system access panel, and dropped to the deck. I looked around. Officers went about their business in the distance. They looked tiny, irrelevant, nothing to do with me.

I replayed Trish’s message. After, I booted my suds bucket as hard as I could; it made a deafening racket as it hit the opposite bulkhead. Water sloshed across the black floor, ripples and currents everywhere. I watched it settle into a puddle of gray water. Still not satisfied, I kicked the damn bucket again and, empty this time, it bounced off the bulkhead again, and landed on its side, mouth open, gaping at me. I kicked it again. I was working up a sweat, and starting to really hate the bucket.

It rolled, at last, badly dented, into the puddle. I slumped against the wall, hands on my knees, exhausted and ­furious. I swore as loud as I could again and again, stalking back and forth across the corridor, eyes squeezed shut, ­determined that I wasn’t going to cry.

ShipMind chimed in my head, interrupting me. “What now?” I said.

There was an urgent item on the General Ship News channel: Captain Rudyard was being escorted back to Eclipse by emergency direct boost shuttle. His ETA was 1320 hours. We were instructed to disregard all public news reports, and stand by for a formal Service announcement shortly.

“What?” I stood there stunned for a while, looking around, scowling, as if by scowling I could frighten the news into making sense. The captain kicked out of the city? Getting in to trouble while on shore leave was like a badge of honor among Service officers of the captain’s generation. And the bigger the trouble, the better they liked it. In any case, the distraction was helpful. Still breathing hard, still full of poisonous anger, I clicked into my news feeds, searched for anything concerning Rudyard, and got a surprising amount of stuff.

Summary: one Humphrey Rudyard, captain of HMS Eclipse, accused with two other senior Service officers of involvement in the deprivation of liberty and repeated assault of two sex workers employed by the Stellar Regent Hotel over the course of a three-day booze binge. The other two Service officers were the captains of the cruiser Echo, one of Eclipse’s sister ships, and the light destroyer Dauntless. The sex workers concerned were not regular, disposable prostitutes, but high-priced human female ­escorts. They managed to escape from the hotel suite and raise the alarm, and had since filed charges with Winter City police. Service Military Police and attack lawyers swooped in with media gag orders and hoped to have the whole matter handled internally.

As I read, the feed cut out, replaced by a “technical problems advisory” — across every feed running stories concerning this incident.

I wanted to laugh, but I hurt too much. So I leaned there, chuckling a little, a gallows laugh, rubbing my aching knees, stretching, rotating my arms and wrists.

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