Meharry still trembled, but it felt different under Barin’s hand, a definite change.
“I . . . have nightmares.”
“Yeah, I’m not surprised. Have you talked to the psychnannies about it?”
“No—I didn’t think it was their kind of problem. I mean, it’s a moral thing.”
“When I was captured,” Barin said, “it wasn’t nearly as bad as this, but I had a rough time afterwards. Nightmares, seeing those men—”
“You were captured, sir?”
“Yeah. I was on a deepspace repair vessel, Koskiusko—”
“The one the Bloodhorde tried for?”
“That very one. They got some personnel aboard, impersonating Fleet personnel from a damaged ship. By the time our people realized they were imposters, they were loose in the ship. They got me when I went to inventory for some parts my boss wanted . . .” He stopped, remembering more than he wanted of the next hours and days.
“What did they—? I mean, if you want to say, sir.”
“I think the worst,” Barin said, “was feeling so damned helpless. They had me trussed up, dragged me around like a parcel. They killed three people in front of me, one of them a woman they raped first. And I couldn’t do a thing . . . me, a Fleet officer, a blinkin’ Serrano. I’d always thought, if something happened, I’d react well, solve the problem. And here they’d knocked me cold before I realized anything was wrong, and . . .”
“But you couldn’t help it—”
“No, but that didn’t keep me from feeling guilty and thinking I should have done something. Thing is, I got some help with all that afterwards. Didn’t want to go; was sure it wouldn’t work, just be a black mark on my record. Thought the nightmares and so on were just punishment for being an incompetent young twit.”
“It really helped?”
“It really helped. Took awhile. Involved going into all sorts of other stuff I thought was totally irrelevant. But it did help.”
“Maybe I should . . .”
“I think so. At least give it a try before you quit on it. There are always ways to die, if it doesn’t work.”
“There is that, sir.” Meharry sat up straighter, stretched his arms. “Sorry—I shouldn’t have—”
“What, bothered me? What else are jigs for?” Barin let his tone go lighter. “Of course you’re supposed to bother me. It’s part of my training. If you want to make master chief someday, you’ll have to recognize your duty to bother young officers.”
Meharry managed a shaky laugh. “I . . . can’t imagine making master chief right now, sir.”
“Well, I can’t imagine making admiral, but given the way your family and mine tend to mature, maybe we’d better start working on it.”
“Do you think . . . they all have this kind of thing to deal with?”
“Bad memories, times they feel they screwed up? I guess . . . I never really thought about it, but . . . I know my aunt does. She doesn’t talk about it to me.”
“No, nor Methi with me.” Meharry took a long breath, then another. “Sir, thanks. I was . . . just purely desperate.”
“I know. And it may come back, at least until you get some treatment. But you’re a lot more than one blow in the dark, Gelan Meharry.”
“And you’re a lot more than one mistake in damage control,” Meharry said, with an accuracy that took Barin’s breath away. “I’ll bet you did the best you could—and you were tryin’ to save lives—maybe you’d have lost people anyway.”
“It’s still my responsibility.”
Meharry cocked his head. “So tell me about it. You listened to me; I’ll listen to you.”
This wasn’t in any leadership manual, and he was dead sure his aunt had never been in a situation like this. But he had demanded trust; now he had to give it. That much he knew, bone-deep.
“All right. There was the hull breach, aft of the compartment I was working in . . .”
“Don’t they usually have a chief running that?”
“The rejuv problem,” Barin said. “Not enough chiefs, too many jigs. Actually our station was up on Troop Deck, but they needed all of us. So there I was, with my team. Enough of the bulkhead between us and the hull breach had spalled off to send shrapnel through the compartment, causing a lot of damage, plus there was a leak to vacuum. When we went in, it was dark, cold, wet, slippery, and you couldn’t see more’n a meter at first.”
“Sounds like a bad stormy night here,” Meharry said.
“What I worried most about was a hydraulic leak,” Barin said. “I’d been warned about those, and sure enough, there was one. And then, whether the bulkhead would hold—it was strained, and that’s where the air was going.” He told the next part quickly—how they’d put up the big patch, how they’d been told to go on and check the environmental tanks.
“Did you have moles in your unit?” Meharry asked.
“No; they were sending us some moles, they said, but in the meantime we could look at gauges and read them off. We had one guy with a chemscan . . .” He stopped, swallowed. “So we rigged emergency lighting. The deck was wet, of course, and part of it was icy as well. Pressure was way down, and the temperature.”
“Was the fight still going on?”
“Yeah. But we were too busy to pay much attention. What I should have known was that we had the wrong kind of chemscan; the one we had was fine for the rest of the ship, but didn’t identify organics. There was a spike . . .” He went on with the rest, gesturing to show where everyone had been, and what he’d tried to do. “I couldn’t move, you see. Not without moving the oxygen around—it’s dispersing all the time, of course, but moving would make it happen faster. And Ghormley, he was the youngest, the newest. I didn’t realize—I thought I’d convinced him to stand still, but he thought I was moving—”
“He triggered it?” Meharry said.
“He was scared,” Barin said. “I guess when I turned my head away from him, he thought we were leaving him alone, but I wouldn’t have—”
“Of course not,” Meharry said. “If you were that kind you’d have bolted for the airlock first thing, and blown them all up.” He pursed his lips. “Kid should have listened to you.”
“I said the wrong things,” Barin said.
“I doubt it. You kept him there longer than he’d have stayed on his own, right? An’ then he panicked. In the dark and cold, knowing he was standing in something that could blow him to bits . . . I can understand that, though he was wrong.”
“I couldn’t stop him,” Barin said. “And if I’d known what I should have about the chemscan, it wouldn’t have happened anyway—we’d have known it was a methane leak right off. Two people dead, several injured, because I thought Environmental was boring. . . .”
“I guess you do know about guilt,” Meharry said. “So how did you survive, standing in the oxygen?”
“Blind luck,” Barin said. “I don’t know, really—I was knocked cold—but they said the explosion jammed me in between a couple of tanks. I came out fine.” The bitterness in his own voice surprised him.
Meharry’s eyebrows went up. “Fine? A medical evacuation here, and how many hours in the regen tanks?” He blew out a long breath. “With all due respect, sir, I think if I need the psychnannies, maybe you do too.”
“Maybe I do,” Barin said. Now he’d let it out, he could see the resemblance to his earlier experience, when he’d felt so inadequate because he couldn’t save them all. “Sauce for the goose, eh? So neither of us gets to jump into the ocean. It’s a deal, is it?”
“Deal, sir.” They shook hands on it; Barin had the sense that he was shaking hands on another deal, one he didn’t quite understand yet.
Captain Terakian offered to let Esmay stay aboard, but she felt she had abused their hospitality enough.