The False Admiral by Sean Danker

give you a stim too.”
    â€œNow you’re speaking my language.”
    Nils was still gaping at the shards of plastic that Deilani had pulled from my back. He looked impressed.
    â€œI’ve had worse,” I told him. My suit had almost finished repairing the tears.
    â€œYou look a little familiar. Sir,” he added, squinting at me.
    â€œIs it my lips? I’ve been told I have very common lips,” I replied.
    He kept staring. I sighed.
    â€œDo I?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œStop treating him like an officer,” Deilani groaned, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Why was the shuttle sabotaged?”
    â€œAsk Tremma,” I told her. “I’m less worried about the why than the who at the moment.”
    â€œBut what do we
do
?” Nils was close to panic. He was holding it together, but after that brush with death, we were all starting tofeel it. Deilani didn’t like me giving orders, but she was conspicuously quiet when it came to proposing solutions.
    I straightened up a little, gently touching the cut over my eye. She’d done a nice job on it.
    â€œWe’re out of options. You’re good, but you’re not good enough to get this whole ship moving, Nils. It’s like you said. We’ll have to wait for rescue.”
    â€œNo power means no beacon,” Deilani pointed out. “And if someone wanted us gone badly enough for this level of sabotage, then we probably are off course. We could be anywhere. Surely whoever sent us out here covered their tracks.”
    I was glad she was thinking clearly. “Probably,” I admitted. “But there’s something you’re forgetting.” I pointed at Salmagard. “She can’t go missing forever. They’d come looking for you, but they might come looking for her even sooner. There
are
ways for them to find us. We’re lucky. We’re stationary. If we’d just been pointed out past the frontier and sent off still asleep, no one would ever find us. And I think that was our saboteur’s plan. But that didn’t happen, and that means we’ve got a chance.”
    â€œProvided we haven’t been asleep for, say, a couple of years,” Deilani said, massaging her temples.
    Nils shook his head. “We haven’t, ma’am. The sleeper records showed we were two weeks out from the courier. So that’s longer than the trip was supposed to be, but it’s not really a long time. Not long enough to send us too far.” He was fidgeting. Nervous energy filled the room, hanging in the air like static electricity. “So we’re already overdue.”
    â€œIt’s out of our hands now. We’ll have to wait.” I rubbed my chin, wondering if there was anything in Medical that I could useto shave. There were lasers that could remove body hair for surgery. I wondered where they were kept.
    No. The stubble was good. It was helping me. It felt weird, but I was better off keeping it.
    â€œShuttle’s gone,” Nils said. “Emergency power won’t last.”
    â€œWe’ll have to get creative,” I said, focusing.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œLieutenant, you’ve just spent a substantial portion of your life training to become a leader.” I looked at her expectantly. “Surely you know what to do.”
    It was the chemicals talking. Deilani just scowled at me. I went on. “We have to buy ourselves as much time as we can, and stay alive until they get here. That’s it. That would be pretty simple if we didn’t have two dead men in the airlock. They didn’t kill
themselves
.”
    â€œYes, they did,” Deilani said. “We saw it was their own incinerators. But what made them do it? If it wasn’t you. That wasn’t one of them murdering the other, or a suicide thing.”
    â€œThat’s what I’d like to know. I wasn’t going to worry about it as long as I thought we were just