“Fuck off, Taylor.” She threw the dildo at him, as luck would have it, just as Janus came walking around the corner.
“Tessil! My ready room. Now!”
There was no time to explain.
“You need to grow up, young lady. This behavior is immature.” Janus stalked back and forth in front of Jerri like a very angry half-cyborg. The woman didn’t seem to have anything in the way of feeling, and really did not understand what was happening on her own ship. She’d managed to get rid of the one good commander and keep the pretty boy asshole with the mental and emotional age of a can of beans. If Jerri had ever respected her, that respect was gone now.
“It was Taylor who tried to give me a fake lizard cock.”
“Excuse me?” Janus’s electric eye flared brighter.
“Oh. Sorry. It was Taylor who tried to give me a fake lizard cock, ma’am.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I want to see improved behavior from you, and instead your reports from the counselor claim you are uncooperative, and I have caught you in the most immature behavior possible. We will be docking at Station Zeta-Nu within the week. If I don’t see a significant improvement before then, I will be putting you off the ship and leaving you for a disciplinary committee to take care of.”
So she had not only lost her lover, she was going to lose her commission too, literally bullied off the ship because Janus couldn’t see past the blue-eyed boy Taylor.
Atlas would never have bothered with all these threats. He would have thrashed her and then he would have told her to get back to work. God, she missed him. The hole he’d left in her life had nothing to fill it. The chaos and the misbehavior and the disrespect had rushed into the core of her. If Janus had any fucking idea what Jerri had planned, she wouldn’t be looking so satisfied.
Chapter Thirteen
Lieutenant Atlas inspected the daily logs again. His position on the new vessel did not involve interaction with any subordinates. It was what his new captain called ‘data facing,’ which was another way of saying you’re not getting anywhere near a female on my ship.
He was a pariah, partly because of his Kitari heritage, but mostly because of the scandal that Taylor and others of his ilk had ensured spread throughout the fleet. He still did his job but he no longer did it with any vigor. A demotion in the Authority for a commander was effectively a death knell for a career. He might one day regain his rank, but not his reputation.
“Atlas.” Commander Rees was a decent man. He went out of his way not to rub Atlas’s face in any of the shameful scandalous rumors that seemed to circulate nonstop around the Intrepid when it came to him.
“Yes, sir?”
Rees came to the point right away. “The Audacity has been stolen.”
“It’s not possible to steal a starship. A minimum crew of thirty is required.”
“That’s not entirely true. If you don’t maintain all systems you can have one moving on your own. There are programs capable of emulating crew. And before you ask what about all the tracking systems, they’ve been disabled. Every last one of them. Even the cargo has stopped pinging.”
“Huh,” Atlas said.
“They’re asking for your help to recover it.”
“Why would I be in any way useful in that particular endeavor?”
“You had a relationship with the primary suspect.”
“And who would that be?” Atlas already knew the answer of course, but he also could not believe the answer he already knew. Surely there was no way any of the command staff of the Audacity would allow a recently busted-down cadet to take control of the entire ship without supervision.
“Someone named Tessil. You’re being charged with the task of catching her and bringing her back to face court-martial.”
He should have known Jerri would not allow things to end the way Captain Janus demanded they end. Apparently nobody had taken his advice to keep her well supervised. Once again, Jerri had fallen through the cracks and this time, she’d taken a whole ship with her.
“It is obviously in everybody’s best interests to keep this matter as quiet and private as possible. You’ll be given an S-class shuttle and full command of any resources you need. I have been reliably, but not officially informed that successfully resolving this situation will lead to a promotion.”
It spoke volumes that they thought they needed to bribe him with the half-promise of a promotion.
“Captain Janus.”
“Lieutenant Atlas.”
He had not imagined he would have to speak to Janus again, but here he was. He had imagined he might feel some embarrassment, but the more he thought about the situation, the more the extreme negligence on her part emerged clearly.
“I’ll need to know what happened.”
“We were docked in port when one of the alarms was triggered, causing a full evacuation. The ship was emptied in due course, only for it to take off at high speed. Of course, we soon noticed that Tessil was missing. It was not a difficult crime to solve.”