David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

He sounded almost incredulous, and Helen shook her head.

"No, of course not. It's just, well-"

"It's just that we feel guilty, too," d'Arezzo said softly. Helen turned her head, staring at him in surprise as he put his finger unerringly on the concept she'd been fumbling towards.

"Yes," she said slowly, looking into those gray eyes as if, in some way, she were seeing their owner for the first time. "Yes, that's exactly what I meant." She turned to look at the others, especially Aikawa. "It's not that I don't think they deserve whatever horrible thing happens to them, Aikawa. I just don't want us to turn into them giving it to them. What we did to that ship ought to constitute sufficient punishment for anything anyone could ever do. I don't say it does, I said it ought to. And if I'm going to like myself, I don't want to turn into someone who wants to personally punish even someone like Clignet even more terribly. I'll pull the lever myself, if they sentence the bastard to hang. Don't get me wrong. But if we can hand them over to someone else-someone who has every bit as much justification and legal jurisdiction as we do, who will proceed after due legal process to punish them further-then I say let's do it."

"Why?" Aikawa demanded. Much of the belligerence had gone out of his tone, but he wasn't quite prepared to give up the fight yet. "Just so we can keep our hands clean?"

"Not our hands, Aikawa," d'Arezzo said. "They're already dirty, and I think Helen and I are both equally willing to get them even dirtier, if that's what our duty requires." He shook his head. "It's not our hands we're worried about; it's our souls."

Aikawa had opened his mouth. Now he shut it again very slowly. He looked back and forth between Helen and d'Arezzo, then at Leo.

"He's got a point," Leo repeated, and Helen nodded in slow, emphatic agreement. Aikawa frowned, but then he shrugged.

"Okay," he said. "Maybe you all do, Leo. And maybe I'll feel differently in a few weeks, or a few months. If I do, I guess it'd be better not to've done a lot of things I'll start wishing I could undo. Besides," he managed an expression far closer to his normal grin, "what really matters is that the bastards get the chop, not that we give it to them. So I guess if the Captain wants to be generous and give Pritchart and Theisman a present, I can go along with that, too."

"Geez, Aikawa, your saintly compassion and kindliness leave me breathless," Helen said dryly, and joined the general chuckle that ran around the table after her sentence. Yet even as she chuckled, she was thinking about the unsuspected depths Paulo d'Arezzo had just revealed. And the even more disturbing thought that perhaps those depths had been unsuspected only by her…

"It feels good to get back to a routine, Skipper," Ansten FitzGerald said frankly as he and Terekhov sat in the captain's quarters drinking Chief Steward Agnelli's delicious coffee. The desk between them was littered with paperwork and record chips as they caught up on all of the routine details of Hexapuma 's day-to-day existence.

"Yes. Yes, it does." Terekhov heard the profound satisfaction in his own voice. He didn't know if the vicious pounding he'd given Anhur had finally laid to rest the demons of Hyacinth. Frankly, he doubted it. But he knew he'd at least made some progress against them, and the demonstration that he hadn't lost his touch after all had been, in his humble opinion, pretty damned convincing. Best of all, he hadn't given in to the almost overwhelming compulsion to hang or space Clignet and his surviving oficers-that cold-blooded, murdering, sadistic bitch Daumier, at the very least-himself. He would never have doubted for a moment that they'd had it coming; but the question of whether he'd done it for justice's sake or simply to slake the fires of his own vengeance in blood was one he never wanted to have to answer. And not just for himself. It would have been one he had to answer for Sinead, as well, even if she never, ever asked him.

"Still," he said, thinking aloud, "we were lucky."

"Some people make their own luck, Skip," FitzGerald said, regarding him through a tiny wisp of steam across his own coffee cup.

"Don't give me that, Ansten." Terekhov smiled crookedly. "Tell me you didn't think I'd gone off my nut when I opted to suck them in that close-if you can!"

"Well… " FitzGerald began, startled that the Captain had brought that particular point up between them.

"Of course you did. For God's sake, Ansten! We've got Mark 16s in the tubes. I could've pounded either one of them-or both-into scrap, with no option but to surrender, without ever letting them into energy range at all. Couldn't I?"

"Yes, Sir, you could have," FitzGerald said quietly. "And I suppose, if I'm going to be honest, I did wonder if not doing that was the best tactical choice."

Even now, the exec was more than a little surprised they could have this conversation. He remembered all his earlier doubts about Aivars Terekhov and the scars Hyacinth must have left behind. And, truth to tell, he wasn't convinced yet that he'd been wrong to harbor them. But the action against Anhur and Clignet's psychopaths had gone a long way toward resolving them. And, more importantly, in many ways, it seemed to have resolved a lingering constraint in his relationship with his Captain.

"I won't lie to you, Ansten," Terekhov said, after a moment, looking down into his cup. "When we found out they were Peeps-and especially that one of them was a Mars class-it did affect my judgment. It made me even more determined not just to defeat them, but to smash them. Ansten," he looked up from the coffee's brown depths, and his blue eyes were dark, without the distancing reserve FitzGerald had become accustomed to, "I wanted to do every single thing we did to them. I know what that ship looked like inside when we finished with her, and I wanted to see it. I wanted to smell it."

FitzGerald gazed at him, his own eyes gray, calm mirrors. Perhaps they wouldn't have been so calm if he hadn't heard Terekhov's tone. If he hadn't recognized his Captain's own realization of the demons he carried around with him.

"But," Terekhov continued, "whatever I wanted, I'd already decided on exactly the sort of engagement I planned to fight if I could get whoever it was that close. I'd made that decision before I knew they were Peeps. Not because I wanted to punish the same people who massacred my people at Hyacinth, but because I wanted-needed - to take them out, whoever they were, so fast and so hard, from such a close range and at such a low relative velocity, that they wouldn't even dream of dumping their computer cores when I told them not to."

"Well, Skip," FitzGerald said with a slow smile, "you certainly did that."

"Yes, I did," Terekhov agreed with a slight smile of his own. "But now that it's over, I realize I need you to help me watch myself." His smile disappeared, and he looked at FitzGerald very levelly. "There's only one person aboard any warship with whom its captain can truly let down his guard, and that's his exec. You're the one person aboard the Kitty I can discuss this with-and the one person in a position to tell me if you think I'm stepping over the line without damaging discipline or undermining the chain of command. That's why I'm telling you this. Because I need you to know I want your input in a case like this."

"I- " FitzGerald paused and sipped coffee, deeply touched by his Captain's admission. The relationship he'd just described was the one which ought to exist between every successful captain and his executive officer, yet the degree and level of frankness he'd asked for-and offered-was attained only too rarely. And FitzGerald wondered if he would have had the moral strength and courage to admit to another officer, especially one of his subordinate officers, that he'd ever doubted his own judgment. Not because he was stupid enough to believe they wouldn't realize he had, but because admitting it simply wasn't the way the game was played.