Dreadnaught

Which leaves me very little room to hammer her. I can’t condemn initiative that effective, not without sending some wrong messages of my own. If I make obedience the only virtue that counts, I might be creating a culture that is at least as bad as the undisciplined mess I first found here. Do I want a fleet full of officers like Captain Vente, who apparently requires exactly what he’s supposed to do spelled out for him? I have to find grounds for relieving him from command of Invincible, but I don’t have any yet.

There were a lot fewer people out and about at that hour, and most of those were at duty stations, so when someone else turned a corner ahead of him, Geary instantly noticed her.

Rione.

She hesitated, then came on toward him until both stopped, facing each other.

“How are you?” Geary asked.

“I’ve been worse.”

Guilt stabbed at him. “Is there anything I can say or do?”

“I doubt it. It’s what you did, what we did, that led to this.” She looked away. “The fault is not yours. It wouldn’t have been even if you had dragged me into your bed because I was willing. In fact, I did the seducing, not you. And I have been candid with my husband about that. But it’s not just about your and my shared past.” Rione lowered her gaze, her expression somber. “Something’s changed in him. He’s darker, harder, more angry.”

“A lot of the former prisoners have serious issues to deal with,” Geary said.

“I know. His are worse. Your fleet medical personnel are worried.” She shook her head. “All he talks about is vengeance. Getting even with the Syndics, getting even with people back in the Callas Republic who he imagines once slighted him, and of course now getting even with you. But I am told that thus far his expressions of anger are within acceptable parameters.” She gave the last words an ironic and bitter twist.

“What about you?”

“Me.” Rione shrugged. “I don’t know. For the sake of the man he once was, I will continue trying to reach him. He is now under no illusions that I will tolerate behavior such as you saw today. But he has trouble accepting that I am not the woman that I once was, that I became a Senator and Co-President of the Callas Republic, that I have done many things while we were apart. In his mind, I was always at home, waiting for him, unchanging. How can I be angry with him for clinging to that vision to sustain him in the darkness of that labor camp? But how could he not know that I would not sit alone in a silent home, endlessly waiting, but instead go out to do what I could?”

“It can be very hard,” Geary said slowly, “to learn how much the world you once knew has changed.”

“You would know.” Her expression and her voice were both growing distant, taking on a strange remoteness even though Rione stood beside him. “And things are always changing, even as they always stay the same. Never trust a politician, Admiral Geary.”

“Not even you?”

A long pause before she answered. “Especially not me.”

“What about the senators on the grand council?” The question he had been wanting to ask for some time.

Rione took even longer to answer this time. “A living hero can be a very inconvenient thing.”

“Is that how the government still thinks?” Geary asked, letting his tone be as blunt as his words.

“The government.” Rione breathed a single, soft laugh though her expression didn’t change. “You speak of ‘the government’ as if it were a single, monolithic beast of huge proportions, with countless hands but only a single brain controlling them. Turn that vision around, Admiral. Perhaps you should consider how things would be if the government was in fact a mammoth creature with a single tremendous hand but many brains trying to direct that hand in its powerful but clumsy efforts to do something, anything. You’ve seen the grand council at work. Which image seems more appropriate to you?”

“What’s going on now? Why are you really here?”

“I am an emissary of the government of the Alliance.” Her voice held not a hint of emotion.

“Who made you an emissary? Navarro?”

“Navarro?” She looked right at him again. “Do you think he would betray you?”

“No.”

“You’re right. Not knowingly. But he was tired, worn-out from his duties on the grand council. Look elsewhere, Admiral. Nothing is simple.”

“We didn’t come to Dunai because your husband was here. You didn’t know he was one of the prisoners here. Who did we come for?”

Another long pause. “Are you looking for one person?” With that, Rione began walking down the passageway away from him.