No doubt it was as well Nimitz hadn’t been there, and, she admitted, there’d been a certain savage joy in hurting him herself for what he’d tried to do. But the response had been entirely out of proportion to his official offense, and no one had ever doubted that his “fall” had been nothing of the sort. Hartley might not have had any proof, but he would never have come down on Young so harshly under the circumstances if he hadn’t had a pretty shrewd notion of what had actually happened.

Yet she hadn’t realized that then, and she’d told herself she’d already dealt with the matter, anyway. That she didn’t want to precipitate a scandal that could only hurt the Academy. That it was a case of least said, soonest mended, since no one would have believed her anyway. Bad enough to be involved in something so humiliating and degrading without exposing herself to that, as well! She’d almost been able to hear the sniggers about the homely horse of a girl and her “delusions,” and, after all, hadn’t she let herself get a little carried away? There’d been no need to pound him into semi-consciousness. That had gone beyond simple selfdefense into the realm of punishment.

So she’d let the matter rest, and in so doing she’d bought herself the worst of both worlds. Attempted rape was one of the service’s crash-and-burn offenses; if Young had been convicted of that, he would never have worn an officer’s uniform, noble birth or no. But he hadn’t been. She hadn’t gotten him out of the service, and she had made an enemy for life, for Young would never forget that she’d beaten him bloody. Nor would he ever forgive her for the humiliation of being forced to apologize to her before Commandant Hartley and his executive officer, and he had powerful friends, both in and out of the service. She’d felt their influence more than once in her career, and his malicious delight in dropping full responsibility for the entire Basilisk System on her shoulders—leaving her with a single, over-age light cruiser to do a job which should have been the task of an entire flotilla—burned on her tongue like poison. It was petty and vicious… and entirely in keeping with his personality.

She inhaled deeply as the lift reached the boat bay and its door opened once more. She’d regained enough of her composure to shake Tankersley’s hand and make herself sound almost normal as she bade him farewell and boarded her cutter once more.

She settled back in her seat as the cutter separated from Warlock and headed back to Fearless, and her mind reached out to grapple with her crew’s reaction to this latest development. No doubt they would see Warlock’s departure as one more sign that they’d been demoted to the least important duty the Fleet could find and abandoned, and they would soon realize just how heavy a burden Young had dropped on them. Her single ship would be required to police the entire system and all of the traffic passing through the Basilisk terminus, and there was no way they could do it. They couldn’t be in enough places at once, and trying to would impose a mind- and body-numbing strain on all of them.