They came around a turn, through another broken segment, into the opening where Meharry had stored his raft. It faced south; thin winter sunlight speared into the sea entrance, revealing every texture of the lava—here glassy, and there scuffed and roughened. It was curiously beautiful—the black rock, the green sea beyond. The place was full of sound—the growling boom of the sea, the hiss of foam and spray, the screech of seabirds, all echoing back and forth, side to side . . . Barin couldn’t really hear what the forensic team were asking Meharry.
He walked nearer the entrance. Out of the north wind, with the sun on him, it wasn’t nearly as cold. He saw something on the floor and squatted to look at it. Something stringy and green, and in it, a tiny many-legged thing with a scarlet shell. He had no idea what he was looking at. Closer to the opening the noise was less confusing; now he could distinguish the originals from the echoes. The outer part of the tube slanted downward a little; he stopped there, staring out into the morning.
“If it had been daylight, she’d have nailed me,” Meharry said. Barin jumped; he hadn’t heard the corporal come up behind him. “I’d have been an easy target, dragging myself over that edge.”
“How did you?” Barin asked. “It’s slippery—”
“Suit wrist and leg grapples,” Meharry said. “Push the studs there—with your thumbs—” Barin obeyed, and the bright steel sprang free.
“Some kind of special tip,” Meharry said. “Supposed to stick into most anything. This rock’s brittle, but I went slow.”
“And in the dark,” Barin said. “Did you have enhanced night vision?” He pressed the studs again and the wrist grapples retracted.
“No—guards on night duty were issued goggles, but they weren’t built into the suits. And I wasn’t on night duty when I went over.”
Barin glanced at him. Meharry spoke in a flat tone unlike his usual voice.
“Does the water ever come up this far?” Barin asked.
“Yes, sir. This planet has a solar tide, of course, and then in storms the wind can pile it up around here. Spray gets in all the time; you probably saw that seaweed back there.”
“I didn’t know what it was,” Barin said.
“Some kind of plant. There’s lots of it out there, on the rocks right at the water line.”
“It reminds me of the ship,” Barin said, almost to himself.
“Sir?”
“When the bulkhead opened—standing in the dark looking out. Then it was stars, and not a sea, but . . . never mind that. How long do you think they’re going to be?”
“Looks like they’re through,” Meharry said, looking behind them. Barin started up the tube, but Meharry didn’t follow. Barin turned and went back to him; the man’s face was taut with misery and some determination.
“Corporal, I know you said you didn’t want to come back here—let’s go back up.”
“Just—just a few minutes, sir.”
Barin’s instincts told him not to leave; he found a smooth bit of floor and sat down. “Come on over here, then; I don’t want to have to squint against the sunlight to see you.”
The sunlight that flashed off the waves almost like the sparkle of an enemy’s attack on shields, the brightness in the sky that was too much like the flare of the explosion.
Meharry came and sat near him, and began talking as if Barin had asked a question. “Thing is, sir—I can’t trust myself—”
“Trust yourself?”
“They told you I killed Commander Bacarion, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well . . . they probably didn’t tell you how.”
“No, they didn’t.” Barin wondered what was coming now.
“Sir, I—” Meharry gulped and looked away. “Being back here, it—it brings it back. It’s like—it’s like it’s still happening. Over and over.”
Barin knew that feeling, too. Meharry needed a psychnanny. Had needed one for months, most likely. But here they were, right at the site of whatever happened, with no psychnanny available and no transport out for the next several days.
“Tell me,” he said.
“I . . . don’t . . . know if I can,” Meharry said. “And anyway, you’ll—”
“I’ll listen,” Barin said. “I’ll hear you.”
“I killed her, but I never meant to. Not at first. She tried to kill me—she had the weapon—” It sounded almost impossible to Barin, that desperate struggle in the dark. “And then when I got my headlamp on, after she quit moving, I saw . . . so much blood . . . and her face . . .”
“Her face—?”
“I . . . my wrist grapples were still out, sir, and when we came to hand to hand, I just hit—and—it was all gone, sir. I—the grapples . . . just tore it off . . .” Meharry was shaking now, eyes squeezed shut, hands clenched under his armpits.
Barin reached out and gripped Meharry’s arm. He wanted to say something, but he knew he had to wait.
“It’s—I never thought of myself like that, sir. Someone who’d attack like that. An officer. A woman. But I did it. I can’t pretend I didn’t, and if I did it once . . . and then I thought of my sister, when she was in prison here. What had Methi done, what did she have to do to survive? I mean, she’s my sister, and she . . . and I . . .”
“I met your sister once,” Barin said. “On my aunt’s ship. She’s a fine person.” She was also a dangerous killer, he was sure, but that wasn’t what Meharry needed to hear right now.
“I thought of asking for a psych-out, sir. When I realized what I’d done, how evil it was. That I was just like Bacarion. But right then they needed everyone, and I thought—I hoped—I could keep it under control. Only now, coming back here, it’s all right now again, just like I was afraid of. I can’t—what if I do it again?”
Barin choked back the first easy reassurances, the Of course you won’t and You’ll be fine, don’t worry that sprang automatically to his lips. Would he believe that if someone told him? Would he never again make the mistakes he’d made? He wished someone else were here, someone with more experience. Heris would know how to talk to this good man, or his grandmother. Or Esmay, what would she say?
“I guess—you understand, sir, why I’m going to have to leave—” Meharry opened his eyes, staring straight out to sea. “It’s all right, Lieutenant. Just go on back up and let me sit here and think things out awhile.”
“No,” Barin said, putting all the command into it he could. He had lost Ghormley; he was not going to lose Meharry. “No, I’m not going to go back upstairs and let you throw yourself into the sea to die.”
Meharry turned toward him, eyes wide with shock.
“If you’re ever faced with another murderous mutineer commander trying to kill you in the dark, Gelan—” He saw the effect of that use of the first name. “If you ever have to fight hand-to-hand like that again, I hope you will do exactly what you did. If she had killed you, and completed her plans, we’d all have been a lot worse off. You didn’t rip her face off”—he used the brutal term intentionally—“for any of the reasons she’d have done it. If you’d had a weapon, you’d have shot her dead, clean and quick. But you didn’t.”
“But—”
“And if you ever have to do it again, which we both hope you won’t, I trust you will feel the same anguish you’ve felt since, because you aren’t like her—like any of them. You don’t take pleasure in cruelty. It was a horrible situation, and what you had to do to survive is something no decent person could be proud of—but the survival mattered. It matters now. I’m not going to let you destroy it.”