“Sir, I—”

“Silence!” he bellowed, and even through her own anger and sense of despair, she knew she was simply the focus his panic-spawned rage had fastened upon. But the knowledge helped nothing, for he could not possibly have chosen a worse one. She was his ops officer, his staff tactician, the one officer he absolutely had to listen to in this situation, and he refused to. She stared at him, trying to think of some way—of any way at all—to reach him, and he punched a com stud savagely.

“Bridge, Captain speaking,” a voice replied.

“Captain Tasco, I have just relieved Commander Jaruwalski of duty,” Santino said spitefully, his burning eyes locked on the ops officer. “I want her off this ship—now. You will provide a pinnace to deliver her to one of the evac ships immediately. I don’t care which. Just see to it. And, Captain—” He paused briefly and let his lips curl with contempt before he resumed. “If necessary,” he said coldly, “you will have Colonel Wellerman remove her from Hadrian under guard.”

The com was silent for at least ten seconds. Then—

“Sir,” Tasco said in a voice which was just that little bit too unshaken, “are you certain about this? I—”

“Dead certain, Captain,” Santino said icily, and took his thumb from the com stud.

“Get out,” he said flatly to Jaruwalski, and then turned his back on her and turned to the rest of his white-faced staff.

The ops officer stared at him a moment longer, then let her gaze sweep the other officers in the compartment. Not one of them would meet her eyes. She had become a pariah, her career ended in that single instant. It wouldn’t matter in the end if she’d been right or wrong; all that would matter was that she had been relieved of duty for cowardice, and her fellow staffers—her friends—refused to look up, as if they feared the same leprosy would infect them if their gazes should touch.

She wanted to scream at them, to demand that they support her, present a united front against Santino’s insanity. But it was useless. Nothing she could say would move them, even though they had to know she was right, and she felt her own anger flood out of her as suddenly as water from a shattered pot. They would sooner risk their own deaths, and the deaths of thousands of others, than Santino’s rage… and their careers.

She gazed at them for one more second, some corner of her mind already knowing she would never see them again, and then turned and walked silently from the compartment.

At least the evacuation plan seemed to be working, Lieutenant Gaines thought thankfully as he swam quickly down the pinnace’s personnel tube to HMS Cantrip’s boat bay. Unfortunately, that seemed to be the only thing that was.

He reached the end of the tube, caught the grab bar, and swung himself into the heavy cruiser’s internal gravity.

“Gaines, Heinrich O., Lieutenant,” he told the harassed ensign waiting by the tube. The young woman’s fingers flew over her portable touchpad, feeding the name into the ship’s computers to check against the current personnel list Orbital Base Three’s computers had transmitted twenty-three minutes ago.