Silent Service

By Nina M. Osier

Explorer ship Captain Kate Landay is on her way home from what should be her final mission when she becomes caught up in a sector-wide coup. She is accused first of insubordination, and then of treason, for refusing to sacrifice her ship and her crew to cover up a superior officer's actions.

Cover Art/Fanny Glass

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CHAPTER ONE



It was so quiet now. Kate Landay lay still, and listened to the blessed silence after the relentless questions, and savored the absence of pain.

Was she conscious, or was this a dream? Or was she dead, and this her first moment of after-life? Right now she didn't care. Later, if there was to be a "later," the curiosity that had been landing her in difficult situations all her life would no doubt kick in; but for the moment she wanted nothing except to be left as she was.

That, of course, was too much to ask. She felt a touch that was human, or at least flesh against her flesh; she heard a voice speaking, that of another female. A voice that was familiar, that she'd never expected or even hoped she might hear again.

"Kate. Kate, don't try to answer me. I'm monitoring you, I'm watching how you react when you hear me. You can go back to sleep in a just a minute, but I need you conscious for a few scans. Unless you're in pain - and you shouldn't be - just relax, just rest. You're safe now, and they didn't do anything to you that I can't fix."

Amy's voice. Amy who had been at her side since Kate Landay was a plebe, a whole career and considerably more than half a lifetime ago.

It really was all right, then; the lack of tactile sensation below her neck must be due to her body's being immersed in regenerative gel. Somehow she had survived, although she couldn't imagine how or why.

"Dr. Salter?" Landay heard a second voice, this one masculine but also familiar. Familiar, yet so long absent from her life that for a moment she couldn't place it - or perhaps just didn't want to place it. And since she couldn't turn her head toward the sound, performing the incredibly difficult task of opening her eyes seemed pointless. "How is she?"

"Conscious, which means you shouldn't be here," Salter answered, with acid in her tone. But it sounded like forced disapproval, as if she said what a physician was supposed to say from habit rather than from real inclination. "But by now she's recognized your voice; see there?"

Salter would of course be indicating the changes in her patient's brain activity, and the man who'd come into the room (or compartment? were they on a ship, or still on the Gateway planet, or somehow back on Earth?) would be looking at the monitor and understanding the readouts and nodding almost absently. His eyes would be on Landay's nude body as she lay suspended in the regen tank, and what he must be seeing would be disturbing even to a person who'd once served as a Ranger in the Sovereignty's defense forces.

Would he be revolted, not just distressed? Landay wondered that almost idly. It had been so long, and her damaged body still had such a dim and tiny spark of life within it, that although she'd clearly just reacted to his presence she couldn't claim to be feeling excited about it. She wasn't feeling much of anything, physically or emotionally, because right now she simply wasn't capable of doing so.

But she heard him when he spoke again, of course, and his voice held neither revulsion nor the pity that would have been worse. He said in a deceptively calm tone that she remembered well even after the passing of two decades in Terran time, "Looks like it was close, Doctor. I guess I almost wasted all those favors I called in."

"Close? Close doesn't count, Joe." Amy Salter uttered a gusty sigh. "She still looks like hell, but she's going to be fine. Kate, you can go back to sleep now. Everything checks out."

"Pleasant dreams," Joseph Costigan added softly, and Landay could have sworn that his fingertips brushed against her cheek as she drifted away into comfortable darkness.



"What happens now, Doctor Salter?" Costigan waited until he was certain that the woman in the regen tank could no longer hear him before he asked that question. Kate Landay was still now, with peace on her face, and that was an improvement over the way she'd looked yesterday when she'd been brought through the Gate. Then her face had been lined with agony she'd no longer been capable of feeling, but that had distorted her features for so long before it ended that her muscles remembered and held their positions even after clinical death had given her release.

She still looked awful, there was no denying that, but already she was healing. The body he'd once known so intimately was twenty years older now, even if she hadn't been savaged inside and out by the Questioners' procedures she would still have been changed by time's passing alone - but he could see that she'd remained very much the athletic woman he remembered. Still slender from rigorous physical training, not from vain self-starvation, he thought now as he noted the contours of muscle that were redefining themselves as the regenerative gel caused her body to remember what its tissues had been like before the Questioners began with her. In this far-off place beyond the Gate he hadn't seen even her image, not once in the twenty years since he had come through that portal himself as refugee and exile; but every line of the form in that tank was familiar to him nonetheless, she had matured but she hadn't truly changed.

Not physically, anyway. Nor emotionally either, he suspected, or she wouldn't be here now in this condition. But would the ordeal from which she was now recovering alter her in anything like the ways that his own experience with Sovereignty justice had changed him?

He could only wonder, because her new life hadn't yet begun. Wouldn't begin until Salter took her out of that tank, until Landay stood again on her own legs (weak and uncertain as those of a Terran horse's foal, if all the post-regen tales he'd heard were true) and let the healing gel be washed from her re-grown skin. Coming out of the tank and showering away the last glistening coating was often compared to the rebirth of ancient legend, and while Costigan was thankful he'd never had that experience himself he suspected the comparison might be an apt one.

The life Kate had known was over, yes. The body in which she had lived her first forty-three years was to all intents and purposes gone, destroyed as punishment for the offense she'd been accused of committing against the Sovereignty and in hopes of gaining the Questioners information about her suspected cohorts. The body Costigan saw now was a new one, growing from the pattern of the other but sharing only the most basic of its structures.

Brain, spinal cord, skeleton, major internal organs. Even the latter group of items would of course have been damaged by the energies to which the Questioners had subjected her, but they never harmed a victim's brain. They had wanted her to know, because without knowing there could be no true punishment; and they had wanted her to be able to communicate, even to the last moment.

Amy Salter was straightening at last from the regen tank's control pad, and she was working her shoulders and sighing with relief. She asked acerbically, "Since when am I 'Doctor Salter' to you, Joe? We never liked each other much, I realize; but we've known each other forever, for gods' sake!"

"I didn't dislike you, Amy." Costigan looked his old rival over, and he made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was doing so. "Kate hasn't changed much in twenty years, but you certainly have."

"If you mean that I've learned how to open my mouth and say what's on my mind, you're right. I had to learn that, I found out fairly early in my first shipboard assignment that if I didn't kick ass when it needed kicking I'd never be able to get Explorer ship crews or Rangers or anyone else I had to take care of to take me seriously. And you sure as hell can't treat a patient who doesn't accept that you're a real doctor, so I just bit the bullet as the old saying goes and started playing the role. And after awhile it started to come naturally." Salter had regen gel on her forehead, a glop that had landed there at some point when she'd found it necessary to touch her patient and had then inadvertently touched her own face. It was harmless, of course; it didn't act on any organism that didn't need its help, but it was messy and she fastidiously wiped it away.

"Kate always told me I didn't really know you," Costigan acknowledged. "And that was true, you were in medical school most of the time that she and I were together; but I've got to admit, I never thought you'd last a year on active duty. Not from what I did see of you then."

"And you still didn't like me very much. But that's old news, Joe." Salter gave him a tired smile. "Now we both get out of here and let her sleep, if that's what you meant when you asked me what happens next. She's perfectly safe, if there are any problems at all the tank will alarm and I'll be back in here inside of a minute. She's progressing beautifully - I expect to have her out of there in a week at the most, possibly in as little as four days. But you know as well as I do that regen's a completely individual process, my job's to monitor and make sure that nothing interferes. Her body and the gel interacting are doing all the real work, she only needed me to set up the protocol correctly and get it started."

"I mean after the regen's completed, Amy." Costigan's gray eyes met Salter's dark ones, and although his tone was matter of fact his gaze was a demand. "I know something else about people who come back from injuries severe enough to cause clinical death, I know that I may not have done her a favor by pulling her out of there and that you may not be doing her a favor by giving her back a healthy body. It's bad enough when the person who's regenned got hurt in an accident, or was injured in a battle...I never heard of bringing anyone back from a torture death before. Do you think she's going to make it?" He paused, and swallowed so hard that his throat moved visibly. "I don't mean is her body going to recover, I mean is she going to make it?"

Salter turned away from him then, and looked at her patient. She studied Kate Landay carefully, as if this woman were simply an intriguing case and not the closest friend of her entire adult life. At last she sighed, looked up at Costigan again, and grinned a small and rather crooked grin. She said softly, "That's up to her, Joe. And in a way it's just as much up to both of us, don't you think? We're all she has now, there's nothing left of her old life here."

"Or of yours," Costigan said, realizing that fact for the first time even though it should have been plain to him from the moment when he'd asked Amy Salter if she would be willing to do this. "You could have stayed on the other side, Amy. You weren't convicted of any crime, you came through that Gate voluntarily - but you left everything familiar behind, too, and now you can no more go back than Kate can."

"Or than you can." Their eyes met again, and this time they locked in a moment of complete understanding. "We're stuck with each other, Joe. You, and me, and Kate. But then that's nothing new, is it?"