Chapter Fifteen
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS, Luciana barely slept. Instead, she reached out to everyone she knew who might be able to advise her on how to combat the horrible mutiny charges. Her request for an appointment with the captain was denied. Anyone with status on the Bridge also turned down her requests.
She instead worked her contacts. Anyone she knew who might know the captain, and could leverage that contact and win her even five minutes with Travers.
No one seemed to know about the death penalty escalation of the charges, and one old contact suggested that she was being hysterical.
Perfectly understandable, sweetheart, but it’s distorting your perspective.
Call me back when this is all over. Lunch is on me.
Luciana came to understand that everyone else thought Devar was guilty. They were distancing themselves from her because he was her son.
On the third day, the Bridge released the full and final report on the arena tragedy, alongside an announcement of the charges against Devar.
Luciana read every word. Her heart was a block of ice. She felt nothing.
Her door panel dinged barely twenty minutes after the report was released and Luciana opened the door automatically, and only thought afterward that opening the door when she didn’t know who was on the other side was probably a stupid thing to do, these days.
Caelen stood there, her jacket pulled in tight around her. Tears spilled down Caelen’s face as Luciana opened the door.
Luciana sighed, pulled her into the house and held her while Caelen wept against Luciana’s shoulder.
Caelen stayed on the couch for the next week.
●
The Forum became a hot pool of fury and vitriol, once the final report was released, which shocked both Luciana and Caelen.
They read the Forum compulsively each day, and gave each other notice when new posts appeared. Anything to do with the arena, with Devar, and the charges, they read carefully and tried to analyze with their numb, traumatized minds.
The first time someone suggested that executing Devar was too extreme, they both read the short entry over and over.
Swiftly, the poster was drowned in replies that shouted them down, and called for a swift trial, and a swifter execution. Let’s wrap this up and move on, one comment said.
As if Devar was a pebble in a shoe, to be shook out and forgotten.
It wasn’t until the next day that a second person had the courage to state that they thought the mutiny classification was outrageous.
We don’t kill each other on the Endurance.
That’s what the ancient humans did to each other.
We want to revert to the ways of our ancestors?
Not only is the mutiny charge ridiculous, but it is also immoral, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a flawed human being. Go back to Earth, if you feel that way.
And the commentor had signed their name.
“Do you know this Temple Bear?” Caelen asked.
“I know the name. Never met them,” Luciana admitted.
Caelen bit her lip. “I wonder if many other people feel the way he does?” And she returned to rereading the post. “Maybe we should comment,” she murmured a few minutes later.
“No,” Luciana said swiftly. “They would just say we’re biased. And we are. It would weaken any arguments against the charges. Do not comment, Caelen. Stay out of it. Let it work itself out.”
Caelen had nodded.
It took only a half-day more for another commenter to support Temple Bear’s position. Their post was a lot longer, pulling on examples demonstrating how useless capital punishment had proved to be throughout man’s history.
The pro-mutiny people tore the argument apart, just as they had tried to shred Temple Bear’s immoral claim, too.
Luciana was still rereading both the original post and the callous, acidic counterarguments when a message dinged on her screen, demanding immediate attention.
“I’ve been called to the Bridge for a meeting.” Her heart fluttered as she looked at Caelen around her screen.
Caelen’s face lit up. “They’re willing to talk!” Happiness shone in her eyes.
“It just says ‘emergency meeting’,” Luciana warned.
“What else could it be?”
“Don’t get your hope up,” Luciana said and went to change and prepare.
She splurged on a pod to the Collinas gate, for she couldn’t stand the idea of how long it would take to walk there. At the gate, she showed the message on her personal pad, as evidence that she was expected. The guards still made her wait, while they connected with the Captain’s office to confirm.
Then, still showing a puzzling reluctance, they let her in.
A guard who looked too young to be an adult escorted her to the Captain’s suite, which lay at the end of another white corridor with pristine, glowing walls. This one didn’t have many doors coming off it like the last one.
At the end, another set of double doors slide aside. The guard took Luciana over to another bench to wait. This one was padded.
She didn’t have to wait long, either. An excessively neat man came up to her. “I’m David. Saska Rosalva’s assistant. The meeting has already started, so let’s just slide you in the side door.”
Luciana hurried after him as he moved over to a door on the other side of the room. Saska Rosalva was Captain Traver’s Chief of Staff. She squashed the flare of hope that tried to bloom in her chest.
David held his hand over a door plate, and glanced at her. “Just slip in and take a chair at the end of the table, okay?”
Luciana frowned. “They are expecting me, aren’t they? I got an invitation…”
“I sent that. Yes, they thought it would be appropriate for you to be there, as you have the largest interest in this.”
The hope persisted in trying to grow. She tamped it down again and as David touched the door plate, she slid through the opening and looked for an empty chair at the table that he had warned her would be there.
It was a huge board table, easily able to seat thirty people around it. At the moment, there were perhaps twelve people, and all of them sat at the top end of the table, which was the end farthest away from where Luciana stood just inside the door, orienting herself.
No way was she going to sit at this end and strain to hear what was being said.
She moved along the table, and the gray-haired woman at the end of the table looked up and stopped talking. That had to be Saska Rosalva, the Chief of Staff, Luciana realized.
Everyone else was alerted by Rosalva’s silence and looked around.
Luciana almost tripped when she realized that one of the people watching her walk up to the table was Brice.
Her heart slammed around in her chest and her mind sang high arias. She hesitated. Could she do this, now? She hadn’t been braced to see him again. She hungrily took in his appearance. The broad shoulders. The planes of his face. The dark eyes.
He looked angry. Clearly, he didn’t want her here any more than she wanted to be here.
“Luciana, please take a seat,” Rosalva said, waving toward the first empty chair on that side of the table.
Luciana fumbled with the chair, her fingers numb and her heart beating way too hard.
“I don’t understand. Why does Luciana need to be here?” Brice said.
“That is the point of the meeting, is it not?” Rosalva asked, her tone pleasant, but cool.
Luciana made herself look around the table, meeting the gaze of anyone studying her. Brice was glaring at Rosalva. Captain Travers was not at the table.
Luciana felt a little jerk of disappointment, but rallied.
The Chief of Staff had huge discretionary powers on the Bridge.
Perhaps Rosalva was the person she should speak to about Devar, after all.
The Chief of Staff wouldn’t be holding this meeting if she didn’t have the ability to make decisions and direct actions.
Rosalva didn’t seem upset by Brice’s peremptory tone. “Luciana is here because the majority of the area that would be taken up by the arena is currently hers. Her stalls and her…office,” Rosalva read off from a pad in front of her.
Luciana froze. Stalls? Office? Arena? Her mind blanked out for a moment, as she tried to orient herself.
Brice rested his hand on the table. It wasn’t quite a slap. “We’re here to talk about rebuilding in the Aventine.” Was he speaking with his teeth clenched? It sounded as though he was.
Rosalva nodded. “And I think we’ve adequately discussed and dispensed with that idea.
No one wants to build on top of the old site.
It would appear as though we are trampling upon ghosts.
Now we are looking at the proposal for building in the Capitol which, I admit, has a lot of merit.
It would revitalize the district in a way that all the programs and funding have failed to do.
We just have to consider compensation schedules. ”
They were talking about taking her stalls away from her.
That was what Rosalva meant by the insipid term “compensation”. They were here to find what price Luciana would be willing to settle for, in exchange for all the assets in her business.
She stood up, and the chair scraped the floor behind her, which pulled everyone’s attention back to her. Luciana was trembling. It was a mix of dashed hopes and fury. Yet it gave her the strength to speak in a way she rarely dared. “Shame on you,” she spat.
There were sounds of surprise around the table. Rosalva just looked at Luciana calmly.
“How dare you pull me into this meeting to talk about business when you are going to execute my son! How can you even think about business when the moral future of this ship is about to expire? How dare you think I would even care about the damn arena and tankball at a time like this?” She glared around the table, only now seeing Bronson there, and beside him, a tall woman wearing bright red lipstick that was too harsh for her sallow features.
“Luciana is right,” Brice said. “This is inappropriate.”
“And you can just shut up, Brice Falcon. I don’t want your assistance, you murdering son of a bitch.”
Gasps sounded.