Elizabeth Moon: Once a Hero

“Take,” the blond man said, still hoarse from the noose. “Greedy swine . . .”

“Very good.” No need to mention that every insult now—after that warning—would raise the price of the job. One did not have to like one’s customers if they produced enough profit, and Arhos—the best in his field—knew to a single credit how much it took to satisfy his feelings.

Though the job itself was intriguing, a challenge he would not have thought of by himself, but one well worth the attempt. Not attempt, he thought . . . the achievement. He had no doubts; they had not failed in an assignment in years. Getting this buffoon out of the office quietly was the only problem that concerned him, once the buffoon had thumb-printed a credit authorization.

“Nasty,” Losa said, after the man had left. “And dangerous.”

“Yes, but solvent. We don’t have to like them . . .”

“You said that before.”

“It’s true.”

“He scared me . . . he wasn’t afraid, he was just angry. What if they want revenge for the insult?”

Arhos looked at her, and wished she’d make up her mind what kind of person she was. “Losa . . . this is a dangerous business, and it’s never bothered you before. We have good security; we’ll be taking precautions. Do you want that rejuvenation, or don’t you?”

“Of course I want it.”

“I think you’re just annoyed that I found the contract, and not you.”

“Maybe.” She sighed, then grinned, as she rarely did now. “I must need one, turning into a cautious old lady before my time.”

“You’re not an old lady, Losa, and now you never will be.”

By the time the flagship reached sector headquarters, Esmay had begun thinking of the court as a door to freedom—freedom from the tensions and rivalries of a cluster of scared junior officers with not enough to do. While it made legal sense, she supposed, to keep them all isolated and relatively idle, it felt like punishment.

Even the largest ship has limited resources for recreation; duties normally fill most of its crew’s time. Esmay tried to make herself use the teaching cubes—she encouraged the others to use them—but with a knot of uncertainty lodged in the middle of her brain, the rest of it couldn’t concentrate on anything as dry as “Methods for back-flushing filters in a closed system” or “Communications protocols for Fleet vessels operating in zones classified F and R.” As for the tactical cubes, she already knew where she’d gone wrong coming back to Xavier, and there was nothing she could do about it now. Besides, none of the tactical cubes considered the technical problems she’d faced in starting a battle with a ship which had suffered internal damage in a mutiny.

She could not work hard enough by day to ensure restful sleep at night. Physical exhaustion might have done that, but her share of the gym time wasn’t enough to achieve that. So the nightmares came, night after night, and she woke sweat-soaked and gritty-eyed. The ones she understood were bad enough, replays of the mutiny or the battle at Xavier, complete with sound and smell. But others seemed to have drawn from memories of every training film, every military gory story she’d ever heard . . . all jumbled together like the vivid shards of a shattered bowl.

She looked up at a killer’s face . . . she looked down to see her own hands slimy with blood and guts . . . she stared into the muzzle of a Pearce-Xochin 382, which seemed to widen until her whole body could slide down inside it . . . she heard herself begging, in a high thin voice, for someone to stop. . . . NO. That time when she woke, tangled in damp bedding, someone was pounding on her door and calling for her. She coughed a few times, then found voice enough to answer.

It was not a door, but a hatch: she was not home, but aboard a ship, which was better than home. She took the deep breaths she told herself to take, and explained to the voice outside that it had been just a bad dream. Grumbles from without: some of us need our sleep too, you know. She apologized, struggling with a rush of sudden, inexplicable anger which urged her to yank open the . . . hatch, not door . . . and strangle the speaker. It was the situation; tempers would naturally flare, and she must set an example. Finally the grumbler left, and she lay back against the bulkhead—the safe gray bulkhead—thinking.

She had not had such dreams in years, not since leaving home for the Fleet prep school. Even at home, they’d been rarer as she got older, although they had been frequent enough to worry her family. Her stepmother and her father had both explained, at tedious length, their origin. She had run away once, after her mother died, a stupid and irresponsible act mitigated by youth and the fact that she was probably already sick with the same fever that killed her mother. She had found trouble, a minor battle in the insurrection now known as the Califer Uprising. Her father’s troops had found and rescued her, but she’d nearly died of the fever. Somehow, what she’d seen and heard and smelled had tangled with the fever during the days in coma, and left her with the bad dreams of something which had never really happened. Not as she dreamed it, anyway.

It made sense that being in a real battle would bring back those old memories and the confusion the fever engendered. She really had smelled spilled guts before; smells were particularly evocative . . . that was in the psychology books she had read secretly in Papa Stefan’s library, when she had believed she was crazy as well as lazy and cowardly and stupid. And now that she understood where the nightmares had been leading, trying to link her past experiences with her present, she could deal with this consciously. She had had nightmares because she needed to make the connection, and now that she had it, she would not need the nightmares.

She fell asleep abruptly, dreaming no more until the bell signaled the time to wake. That day she congratulated herself on figuring it out, and instructed herself to have no more nightmares. She was tense at bedtime, but talked herself out of it. If she dreamed, she did not remember it, and no one complained of the noise she made. Only once more before they reached Sector HQ did she have a nightmare, and that one was even easier to understand. She dreamt she came into the court-martial and only when the presiding officer spoke discovered that she was stark naked. When she tried to run out, she could not move. They all looked at her, and laughed, and then walked out, leaving her alone.

It was almost a relief to find she could have normal nightmares.

At Sector HQ, her replacement uniforms were ready, delivered directly to the quarantine section aboard the ship by guards who clearly felt this beneath their dignity. The new clothes felt stiff and awkward, as if her body had changed in ways that measurements could not reflect. She had used the minimal fitness equipment in the quarantined section daily, so the difference wasn’t flab. It was . . . something more mental than physical. Peli and Liam groaned dramatically when they saw their tailors’ bills; Esmay said nothing about hers, and only later realized they assumed she had no resources beyond her salary.

For the first time, the young officers were called before the admiral as a group. Esmay wore a new uniform; so did everyone else. An armed escort led them; another closed in behind. Esmay tried to breathe normally, but could not help worrying—had something else gone wrong? What could it be?

Admiral Serrano waited, expressionless, as they all filed into the office, packed in so close that Esmay could smell the new fabric of their uniforms. The admiral had responded to each formal greeting with a little nod, and a flick of her eyes to the next in line.