Christopher Nuttall - The Nelson Touch

He watched them leaving the compartment, then stood and headed out of the hatch himself, down towards the lower sections of Officer Country. The Admiral’s staff were entitled to cabins, although he’d been careful not to assemble more staffers than he actually needed, unlike some Admirals. But then, shipboard duty wasn’t quite the same as duty on the ground or the Luna Academy. There, he’d probably need more aids just to keep his appointments calendar.

The hatch in front of him was closed, firmly. He hesitated — as the Admiral, he had the right to enter his assistant’s cabin whenever he wanted — and then pressed his hand against the buzzer. There was a long pause, long enough for him to start worrying, then the hatch hissed open, revealing a darkened room. Ted reached for the light switch and tapped it, bringing up the lights. Lopez sat on her sofa, staring at nothing. She barely even seemed to acknowledge his presence.

“Janelle,” he said, quietly. For a moment, he felt utterly helpless. Comforting someone who had lost a loved one was never easy, but this was going to be worse. He had to tell her the truth as well as comfort her, knowing that the truth wouldn’t set her free. “Janelle, we have to talk.”

Lopez looked up, surprised — perhaps — by his use of her first name. Her eyes were bleary, as if she had been crying. Ted didn’t blame her. Losing a loved one was always hard. If it had been up to him, he would give her a week of freedom from her duties and then talk to her. But somehow he suspected he didn’t have the time. She needed to come to terms with what he intended to tell her.

“Admiral,” she said. “I…”

Ted looked her up and down, then sat beside her. “We have to talk,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss, but we have to talk.”

He found himself tongue-tied, again. “Charles Augustus… wasn’t just Charles Augustus,” he said. She looked up, sharply. “He was a bit more than just another starfighter pilot.”

Janelle looked at him. “Your son?”

Ted shook his head. Why would anyone assume that Charles Augustus had been his son? If he had been, he wouldn’t have been allowed to serve under Ted’s command, no matter how many layers there were between him and his father. But it was far more serious than that…

“His real name was Henry,” he said, quietly. “ Prince Henry.”

Janelle stiffened beside him. “No,” she said. “You’re lying.”

Saying that to an Admiral was grounds for court martial, or at least some thoroughly unpleasant duties, but Ted let it pass. She was upset, after all, and there were no witnesses. And he probably wasn’t handling it very well. He might have come to think of her as a daughter of sorts, but he had no real experience in handling children. There had been no son or daughter in his life.

“I wish I was,” Ted said. He wouldn’t have played such a joke on anyone for anything, no matter how much he disliked them. “You must have read his file, when you had a chance. It was rather thin.”

Janelle twitched, uncomfortably. “Why… why didn’t he tell me ?”

“He wanted a normal life,” Ted confessed. “I believe he intended to tell you after we successfully escaped Target One, but he never had the chance.”

He paused. “How did you feel about him?”

“I liked him,” Janelle said. She started to shake, tears dripping from her eyes. “But how much of what I saw was a lie?”

“None of it, I believe,” Ted said, trying to comfort her. “But he didn’t tell you about his family. Or his title.”

He hesitated, then wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly while she cried. She had cared for Prince Henry, perhaps even loved him, although Ted knew that such relationships, forged in the heat of battle, rarely survived the test of time. The stress of knowing that death could come at any moment pushed people into bed together, but if they survived they sometimes discovered they’d made a mistake. And that happened without discovering that one person wasn’t quite who they claimed to be.

At least there’s no risk of pregnancy , he thought. They would both have had implants.

“It will get worse,” Ted said. “His death will unleash the hounds of hell, otherwise known as the reporters.”

She shuddered. Like him, she’d seen the reporters who had been embedded with Ark Royal’s crew during their previous mission. She knew just how awful they could be when they thought the public — or they, at least — had a right to know. And that had been when she’d been nothing more than a very junior midshipwoman. What would they be like when she was the lover of the dead prince?

“Don’t tell them,” she said. “ Please .”

“I intend to tell no one, apart from the King,” Ted said. He had a feeling the Prince’s father deserved to know. Besides, covering it up completely probably wasn’t possible. “But if they find out…”

He shook his head. “It could be very bad.”

“Yes, sir,” Lopez said.

Ted carefully released her and stood. “Take the next few days off,” he said. They were still in alien-controlled space, but he suspected she would be useless in the CIC. “And…”

He took a breath. “If you need to talk to someone, you can always talk to me,” he added. “I’ll always have time for you.”

There would be talk if people noticed, yet there was no choice. It was rare for an Admiral to talk openly to his subordinate, but there was no one else on the ship she could confide in, not now. Did she even have friends among the crew? Most of the people she’d worked with while the carrier had sat in the Naval Reserve were gone now, promoted to other ships. And as the Admiral’s assistant, she was isolated from the newcomers.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, miserably.

Ted looked at her sadly, then walked out of the cabin.

“You’d think they’d be coming after us with everything they had,” Rose said.

Kurt nodded. One system had given way to another — the site of the previous ambush — yet the aliens hadn’t even tried to bar their way. Indeed, they’d almost seemed inclined to just let the humans go without further trouble. The pilots had speculated that the aliens were scared of the fleet — why not, after they’d pounded their way through several alien formations? — but Kurt suspected it was something else. And, when they found out the truth, he had a nasty feeling they weren’t going to like it.

“Let’s not be ungrateful,” he said. The crew had been working constantly to repair as much as they could of the damaged ships. If the aliens wanted to give them time to make repairs, the Admiral had said, why not let them? “We can find other uses for our time.”

Rose snorted. She lay naked on the deck, happy after a long bout of lovemaking that had cheered them both up after the shock of discovering just how many pilots had been killed in the fighting and the struggle to reintegrate the remaining fighters into a handful of squadrons. The French pilots, at least, seemed to be fitting in well, but many of them were badly depressed. It was hard to blame them after watching Napoleon’s sudden and violent death.

“Yes,” Rose said, as she rolled over and straddled him. “I suppose we can.”

Afterwards, Kurt remembered his children and wondered, bitterly, what had happened to them. Had Molly poisoned their minds against him? Or had she simply left them in the care of the hired help and vanished with… someone? Or… what? There was no way to know until they reached Earth. Absently, he wondered just how she would react to discovering that there was no more prize money. Would she be horrified, knowing that her new lifestyle was hardly sustainable, or would she demand that he continue to finance her anyway? Or what…?