Hope's Folly (37 page)

He met his chief engineer's gaze evenly. “Failure and stupidity.” He didn't even try to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Both mine.”

He leaned on his cane and pushed for the corridor. It was going to be a long, painful walk back up to sick bay.

It was twenty minutes before Philip was allowed access to her in sick bay. And when he was, he found Rya sitting up on the edge of a diagnostic bed, palms pressed flat against the sheets, a thin pale-blue towel draped around her neck. The corner of a yellow pain patch was visible on the right side of her collarbone. Her shirt and undershirt were missing. Any other time, the thought of Rya half naked would put a broad grin on his face. And generate more interesting reactions in other parts of his anatomy.

Now, perversely, it angered him. “What in hell are you doing sitting up?”

“Where's Welford?” she shot back.

“I tried telling Lieutenant Bennton she needs to rest,” came a male voice from an adjoining room behind Rya. Not Welford's voice. One of the med-tech's. Dugan. Philip read his name tag as the meddie walked in, one hand up, two large light-purple anti-infective sticky patches dangling from his fingertips. “She won't listen.”

Philip looked back at Rya. “You're confined—”

“Get Welford up here. We need to—” She jerked upright with a yelp. “Slagging mother of God, that stings!”

Dugan grinned at Philip from over Rya's bare shoulder. “Triple dose, Lieutenant. Or else you're not leaving my sick bay.”

“Sadist.”

Rya's flinching had rearranged the towel, which would not under normal circumstances, Philip noted sagely, have done much to cover her anyway. Now one breast and peaked nipple were exposed. With a self-chastising sigh, he stepped closer and grabbed the edges of the towel with his free hand, bringing them together almost under her chin. He tried not to notice how that action revealed the sides of her breasts.

He glared down at her. She glared up at him.

“If you'll excuse me, Admiral, Lieutenant, I, uh, have other patients to torture.” Dugan disappeared.

“You need to stay in sick bay,” Philip said, his voice softening.

“You need to get Welford up here. Holton and Sparks too. Mather was an Imperial mole. And one who liked to brag. There's never been anything wrong with the
Folly's
communications systems. Tage knows everything that's happened on board this ship. And everything that's happened on the
Nowicki.”

It took a heartbeat or two for her words to register.
Tage knows …

Philip released his grasp on her towel, then shoved his cane in her hand. He yanked at the zipper on his gray uniform shirt, stripping down to the black long-sleeved thermal he wore underneath. “Put this on,” he said gruffly, pulling the shirtsleeves over his wrists. “We'll discuss it in the ready room.”

She was staring at him again with those clear hazel eyes. Defiantly. Challengingly. He couldn't look away. He didn't want to look away. He stood there, his shirt balled up in one hand, very aware of her knees pressed against his thighs, of the heat generated at their point of contact. Very aware of heat rising to his face. Slowly, she pulled the towel from around her neck, one tantalizing inch at a time, until only rich brown curls brushed against her bare shoulders and against the yellow and purple med-broches stuck haphazardly on her skin.

He felt his groin tighten in response, the heat on his face flashing through his body.

Somewhere, he was sure, paint peeled off the bulkheads.

She was shot, she was bruised, and she was, in Philip's estimation, beyond beautiful. Incredibly desirable.

She plucked at the shirt in his fingers with a gentle tug, then another, before his brain kicked in, telling him what he wanted. She shoved the towel into his empty hand with a much firmer motion. At that point he forced himself to look away, because this could not go where he wanted it to, no matter how much he and his body wanted it to.

He had a war to wage and a fleet to cobble together. And Darius Tage knew far, far too much.

Rya leaned back against the ready-room chair, tugging Philip's shirt more tightly around her. Fifteen minutes ago, when she pulled it on, it held the warmth of his body. That warmth was gone but it still smelled like him, like holster leather and soap and maleness. She tried to concentrate on that, not on the throbbing pain in her shoulder or the prickly sting of the slagging anti-infective patches stuck on her skin like grotesque pastel leeches.

She probably should be in sick bay, but God damn it, she was the one who'd unmasked Mather as an Imperial operative. This was
her
mission,
her
investigation. She would see it through to the end or to the point where Philip tossed her off his ship. Whichever came first.

And she'd take his shirt with her.

And Captain Folly too. The cat snored softly on the chair on her right. The deep scratch on his side that he endured bolting from his cage had been cleaned by the same Dugan the Sadist who'd treated her. Only a lot more gently, she was sure. The captain had claws.

She reached over and scratched his ears as Welford trudged in from the bridge, mouth pursed. He shoved his datapad across the table to where she and Philip sat, waiting for the XO's preliminary analysis on the extent of Mather's subterfuge. And sabotage.

“I took apart everything that's happened at Commo's station since we came on board. He's been transmitting to a datalink here,” Welford leaned in front of Philip to jab his finger on the pad's screen, “that in turns feeds everything to three different Imperial drones. Two in Calth, one in Baris. He's been receiving information, probably orders as well. But what he received, I can't tell you.”

“ Self-destructs?” Philip asked.

“The Empire is nothing if not consistent,” Welford answered.

Philip nodded.

“Even self-destructs leave behind something,” Rya said.

Welford huffed out a sigh. “With the equipment on Ferrin's, I might be able to do more. But on this ship and in jump transit—hell. I can't even send the code fragments to someone else for analysis.”

Which was why they couldn't warn the
Nowicki.
One of the first things they'd discussed. Philip had a top-priority heavily encoded message ready to go the moment they cleared the exit gate. But that was almost two shipdays away.

A lot could happen out there in real time in two shipdays.

Sachi Holton stepped into the ready room from the corridor. Two of her short braids had unraveled. Dark curls hung down the left side of her face, the red hair clips she'd used now secured to the collar of her gray shirt. “Sparks confirmed those containers in the machine shop contained just enough disty-boom to set off another explosion. Probably, as Rya guessed, in the shop or the shuttle bays. Mather had a detonator almost finished on the table down there. Corvang found more parts when we tossed his cabin.”

“Any archivers or log feeds?” Rya asked.

Sachi shook her head, making her braids wiggle. “Not that Corvang or I could find.”

Philip snorted softly. “You think he was recording his evil deeds for posterity?”

Rya slanted him a glance. “He was an operative in deep cover, out of contact for most of the time with his handlers. He
couldn't
trust his memory to accurately relay what the Empire wanted to know. He had to use some kind of data-storage device like an archiver. Something easily concealed that could be encrypted.”

“He could have destroyed it as a precaution,” Welford said.

“I didn't get the feeling down there in the machine shop that he thought today was his day to die.”

“I'll look again,” Sachi offered. “There are a couple empty cabins down the corridor from his. He might have stashed things in there.”

Rya grasped the arms of her chair and pushed herself up. “I'll go with you.”

Philip held her chair in place. “Sit, Lieutenant.”

“I know what I'm looking for. Sir,” she added because she knew her doing so irked him. And she couldn't help herself. Must be the pain meds.

He didn't let go of her chair. “Request denied. Now, sit!”

She sat, but she glared at him.

He glared back at her.

“I'll go check those cabins.” Sachi ducked quickly out of the ready room.

“I can and will,” Philip said with a soft but insistent tone in his voice, his gaze unwavering, “beat you with my cane.”

Welford made a disgusted noise. “I might as well go help Holton.” He headed for the corridor. Or at least Rya thought he did. She was still staring at the marvelous blue eyes and wasn't totally sure of what else was happening in the ready room.

Damned pain meds.

Philip turned away abruptly, dragging Welford's datapad in front of him.

She refocused, pushing away her pain, the physical and the emotional.

“Even self-destructs leave behind something,” she reiterated, because she knew what bothered him about Welford's report. The same thing that bothered her. The problem was larger than they thought. And their only source of information was dead.

He grunted, scowling.

She leaned to her right and pulled up the closest deskscreen. Her security code brought up the files she'd saved after Commo—Mather left her office. “He transferred off the
Waldor Rey
to the
Nowicki,
about three years ago. That makes sense. A few other things don't, in light of what happened.”

Philip angled his face toward her. “Olefar was the
Rey's
captain.”

Olefar. Amazing how much could be transmitted through tone and three syllables. Philip didn't like the man any more than her father had. “I thought he still was.”

“He got the
Masting
after Tage—” He stopped, eyes darkening. “He was rewarded for his loyalty.”

“Mather wasn't. He got an EFS-Gold and went nowhere. He was still third commo when the
Nowicki
took him.” Or did he really go nowhere? Maybe his promotions, unlike his Exemplary Fleet Service commendation, were not the kind normally recorded in a standard personnel jacket.

“What else?”

“Here.” She pointed to her deskscreen as he leaned on the arm of her chair. “COMTAC training right after assignment to the
Nowicki.
So they put him on the ship, then send him off to school, then put him back. Not unusual, but not—”

“This is only what Fleet wants us to see, not what really happened. Not who or what Mather really is.”

“He was a year ahead of you in the academy. Did you know him?”

Philip pursed his lips, eyes narrowing. “Not that I remember. And that's assuming this,” he pointed to her screen, “is even remotely factual. I'm going to take a wild guess and state that Tage put Mather on the
Nowicki
because of me. I'd been,” and he sighed, shaking his head, “incredibly naive, and with the promise of an admiralty dangled before me, by Tage, I took to confiding in him all the things I saw wrong with the Empire and the Admirals’ Council. He encouraged my ‘refreshing honesty,’ as he used to call it. All my honesty did was provide him with a list of people he could call traitors.”

“Why put Mather on the
Nowicki?
The
Loviti
was your ship.”

“Jodey Bralford was my XO on the
Loviti.
And a good friend. Still is. When he took command of the
Nowicki,
it evidently presented Tage with the perfect opportunity to have all my conversations with Jodey recorded and sent to him, especially after the incident on Marker with Chaz and Sullivan.”

Incident on Marker? Marker was actually several stations that comprised the main Imperial shipyards in Aldan. “The fire there a few month ago?” she asked, her mind grasping for details.

“Remember the incident on Corsau years ago when a shipment of jukors … Well, you might not be old enough.” Philip cleared his throat.

“I remember. A shipment of those mutant beasts escaped, killing civilians, just like on Umoran recently.” Jukors scared the hell out of her. She'd seen one once. She never wanted to see another fanged, razor-winged abomination again.

“There was a breeding facility for them on Marker. Sullivan and Chaz destroyed it and have been hunting down other breeding labs ever since. Corsau was no accident. Neither was Umoran. Thing is, I helped them get off Marker before station cops could find them. I always wondered if Tage somehow suspected. Once Jodey took over the
Nowicki, and
with Mather in position as commo, Tage had his proof. Proof of that and everything else since.” He shook his head slowly, his mouth a grim line. “I can see that so goddamned clearly now.”

“And when the
Nowicki
came with the Alliance, so did Mather.”

“The entire Alliance is at risk, and there's not one goddamned thing I can do about it. Even if I could reach Jodey right now, the damage is already done. Every bit of data that's on that ship is in Tage's hands.”

“Found them!” Sachi Holton bounced into the ready room, breathless. Welford appeared behind her. She glanced over her shoulder at him, then held up two thin rectangular objects, triumph in the wide grin on her face.