She didn't catch up with Amanda at the realtor's, but she managed to be at a street cafe down the road when the smaller woman stopped to hunch over a cup of something hot and steaming. Amanda looked like she hadn't eaten in days, but she still didn't have any food in front of her. Just the cup of coffee, bony and sallow fingers wrapped around it, index finger tapping a rhythm on the opposite side.

"Hey," Hannah called out, softly, so as not to startle her and make her slosh the drink all over herself. Amanda's head jerked up, but the drink didn't spill. "Mind if I join you?"

Public place. She couldn't turn it down as vehemently as she maybe wanted to, but it gave her options, choice. Something Hannah figured Rushman hadn't left her with very much of. After a moment's thought Amanda nodded. "Sure, all right."

Hannah nodded, but went to get a coffee herself and a couple of pastries pointed out at random before she pulled up a chair. Amanda looked like she needed to eat. If Hannah ate something tasty-smelling in front of her, maybe she'd remember that.

She twitched as Hannah sat down. Fidgeted more, one leg crossed over the other and bouncing, looking around as though she expected the little weasel to come up behind her at any point. Or someone unwelcome, at least. As though she thought that at any moment someone would come up and tell her she wasn't supposed to be sitting and enjoying a coffee, talking to a friend.

"Expecting someone?" Hannah took the seat opposite her, putting the pastries more towards the middle of the table, wrapping her hands around her own cup to mirror Amanda and so she would look at least a little more harmless. Her muscled arms pocked with scars from sparks off the electrodes and wiring contrasted with Amanda's lean ones, wrist bone jutting out more than usual through the skin.

She shook her head. "Just... stopping by for a cup of coffee."

"Mmm." Hannah took a sip, spread her hands open on the table to contrast herself with Amanda's hunched posture. More receptive, more approachable. If she was lucky she would even pull Amanda towards being a little more open. "Rushman's in a meeting, you know. It'll take him a couple hours to get out of it even if it goes well."

Amanda twitched again, confirming a suspicion. Not that Hannah knew if Rushman was in a meeting or not, but one of those reports had included a tentative schedule for depositions and his had been scheduled for today. He might have rescheduled it. Given that he liked to play mind games, he might have shuffled the times around by claiming to be busy at one point or another. Still, Hannah didn't think he'd be showing up at least for the next fifteen minutes. She hoped.

"Oh. He didn't mention..." Amanda bit the rest of that off, but it was enough for Hannah to know that they were intimate. And she could guess that he had told Amanda his schedule, expected her to abide by it instead of setting her own pace. Having to conform to a schedule could help when you didn't know what to do next, lost in grief. Hell, she knew that from being a soldier and having all her scheduled check-ins with the therapist, three squares a day, reveille and lights out. Some structures were helpful. Others, not so much.

"Maybe it slipped his mind," she offered, a little disturbed when Amanda didn't point out the obvious holes in that. Someone as meticulous, careful and refined as Rushman was wouldn't let a three hour meeting slip his mind.

"I guess, yeah."

Without support, the conversation collapsed into an awkward silence and the distant noise of the rest of the street and the other patrons of the cafe. Amanda still looked around, distracted. Hannah reached over and covered her hand. "Hey. Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm fine," she said automatically, shaking her head and pulling her hand away to brush her hair out of her eyes. "I'm all right."

Hannah might not be the most skilled therapist or interrogator, or either one at all, but she knew a brush-off when she heard it. Rote phrases spoken because the other person would have to abide by the rules of politeness and back off. The military didn't have all of the same rules as polite society, and they both encouraged and discouraged backing off, sometimes in the same situation at the same time. Mostly what they encouraged was bluntness.

"No, you're not. You haven't been eating, you look like hell, and you're jittery... is that your first cup of coffee or your third?" Amanda started, stared at her with the first sign of real feeling since Hannah had sat down. "You're not fine. You're light years away from fine."

"I'm fine," Amanda pushed away from the table, jostling both coffee cups. Hannah stood, too.

"Is that because he tells you you're doing okay or because you really feel fine?"

The younger woman's mouth hung open for a second, then she grabbed her coffee cup and stalked off. Hannah didn't know whether to stalk after her but decided it was better than hanging around and collecting stares. She grabbed the pastries, too, left the coffee.

"Leave me alone!" Amanda tossed over her shoulder.

"So, you can say that to me but you let Rushman walk all over you?" Bad move, she knew it the moment the words were out of her mouth, but all Amanda did was turn and gape. Hannah slammed the pastries against her chest. "Here, eat something before you fall over."

"I'm not hungry," she muttered. But she picked at the edges of a cinnamon roll anyway, making faces at the sweetness. They were a little too sweet, Hannah realized, sucking the sugar glaze off of her fingers. "Ian doesn't walk all over me. He's... helpful."

"Really. He's helpfully inviting you to move in with him when you had a decent place of your own..."

"I can't stay there, all right? There's too much..."

"You think I don't know what that's like, staring around at the places where they used to be every day? You think I don't see them at the table, on the bunks, you think I don't turn around every time I see even a little something out of the corner of my eye thinking, just for a second, that it's one of them? You think it doesn't hurt when I wonder why the bunk room is so empty, when I forget for a second that I'm the only one left?"

They'd cleared the sidewalk with yelling. Amanda's face went slack somewhere halfway through the tirade, not that Hannah could blame her. Years of shouting above artillery fire gave her a healthy voice and pair of lungs. Lacking artillery fire, it sounded as though she'd silenced the whole street.

Neither of them knew what to say, given half a second to step back and take a breath and realize they were making a scene in a public street.

Hannah grabbed her arm and kept them walking. "You could have moved to a smaller apartment. You could have done anything, and he talked you into moving with him. He's been taking you out to dinner, paying for your groceries, making you feel treated and special and guilty when you don't accept his gifts, right?" That part she knew about, she'd had her share of awkward gift-giving moments in relationships. Never to this degree.

Amanda nodded, covering one hand over the other and pulling away from Hannah after a little bit. The cinnamon roll was gone, eaten or dropped behind them, she didn't know which.

"Amanda, you have to see what he's doing here..."

"I see that he's helping me," she repeated, chin lifted as she wiped her mouth until all traces of stickiness were gone. "I'm a grown woman, I can make my own choices about who to be with."

It sounded off. It sounded like she wasn't convinced but she'd been handed the words by someone else. Maybe he hadn't outright told her to say that if anyone asked, but he very well could have told her so often she was convinced it was true. Hannah hadn't known her well before all of this went down but she was pretty sure Rushman wasn't a guy she would have chosen to be with, under ordinary circumstances.

Which gave rise to all kinds of interesting questions and suspicions that sounded paranoid on the face of it. Hannah clamped her jaw shut on those and coughed up a much weaker reply. "Well, it doesn't look like you're making your own choices to me. It looks like you're making his."

Amanda spun around. "You're just jealous because your boyfriend wouldn't even admit it before he died. Because he loved his wife better than you."

Hannah was shocked enough that Amanda knew about that to let her go without another word.

Her fingers stabbed the keypad in a steadily boiling rage as she pulled together all the information they'd gathered on Rushman and his activities. They hadn't yet sat down and gone over it, but by now Hannah was just angry enough to go through report after report, file after file, looking for key words and phrases that grabbed her attention and copying or summarizing the passages into a clean and chronologically aligned file. She was prepared to spend hours at it. Days, if she had to.

"Son of a goatfucking greasy bitch." Every new revelation about Rushman carried with it new reasons to hate his diseased, shriveled heart. Who he worked for, or rather who worked for him, which seemed to consist of a long line of of shell companies leading back to, surprise surprise, himself. And the government. Potentially several governments, if a couple of other searches led back where she thought they would. Publically he was the head of a company that also maintained a charitable organization taking care of civilians in the war zone. But in addition to that he was the majority shareholder on a medical technologies company from which said charitable organization, with government and private sponsorship, bought their equipment. The medical company in turn was supplied with parts and training by an engineering company that also worked on her BIOsystems, and that was as far as she got when Cynthia opened the door.

"What is it?" She came stalking up the aisle between bunks, heels clacking on the floor. She hadn't changed out of her working clothes. "Your messages said it was urgent." One eyebrow arched slightly as she emphasized the plural.

"Look," Hannah turned the screen around and pointed. "First, look and see what he's into. Then look and see what they do."

Cynthia scrolled through the information, got to the shell companies, through the armaments, the contracts. Hannah watched her go through the same series of expressions, disbelief to incredulity to horror to rage, though she cycled back around to horror again while Hannah had stayed at blind, semi-coherent rage for a while.

"You're not serious."

Hannah got off the bed so she didn't kick something breakable. "Oh, I am. His company was responsible for the intelligence that got us killed." She didn't even hear what she was saying, there. "His company was responsible for collating it, at least, which means he could damn well have slipped something in. And his other company under the same shell company a couple companies in? They make..."

The older woman shook her head. "I don't know what these..."

"Try this one." Hannah reached over, switched screens from the data searches to the internal investigation reports, the part where an engineering company only a couple layers removed from Rushman had examined the destroyed BIOsystems and described what kinds of weapons had been used against them. All of them matched what they had been briefed on as to enemy capabilities. A single separate report offered a different theory, that the weapons responsible were still prototypes, not yet in production. That person's name, whoever he was, didn't appear on any reports dated after that, a fact Hannah found even more suspicious.

Cynthia put her fingers to her temples. "Do they know about this? The investigative team?"

"They know, they just don't know that he knows. Or," she grimaced, jerked her head side to side in a furious negatory. "They know he knows, they just don't have proof that he knows. My guess is he's been very, very careful to cover up his involvement in all of this. All this legal crap, if nothing else."

"Of course." Cynthia moved over to the wall and traced her fingers down the line of offices, departments, and corporations Hannah had pinned up in an effort to understand the web of assocation. "So... So what does that mean we should do?"

Hannah didn't know. She would have looked to Cynthia if Cynthia hadn't asked first. "Rushman... he must have bought someone to get all this passed through."

"Several someones."

She liked that thought even less. "We don't know who. We ... I can't play the politics, not like he can, can you?"

More temple rubbing, and Cynthia muttered words to herself that didn't sound at all polite. Possibly, Hannah thought with a flash of tired amusement, words she'd learned from the Commander. "I don't have the connections. Either that I could call upon, myself, or that I could persuade someone to do it for me. I mean, I know them, but it'd be a lot to ask with only this series of coincidences and no idea who's actually working for him or what they're being paid."

Hannah made a sour clicking noise with her tongue. "Was there ever a time when politicians ..."

"... Couldn't be bought and sold like food packages? Only in people's dimmest memories, with all the bad parts stripped away. No, for this..." Cynthia gave it some thought, leaning back against one of the pillars of the bunk. "We need to do something that catches their attention. Catch him out in something unpleasant. It doesn't even have to be illegal, it just..."

"More unpleasant than brainwashing and subverting a young woman?" Hannah snapped. "That's right out there in the open..."

She trailed off on Cynthia's look. The look that said she was being silly and idealistic. "No one pays attention to that sort of thing," she told her, her tone frostier than Hannah had ever heard it in her direction. If the frost was aimed in her direction at all. "No one wants to be forced to admit something unpleasant is going on, they might have to deal with it. And then be embarrassed by having said something in public. When it's probably her fault anyway, for being..."

"Cynthia."

Hannah learned that tone of voice from both the military and the Commander, they all had. It jerked Cynthia out of her memories, at least. "Sorry. But no. Something more unpleasant than that. Something more blatant, at least."

"Something more blatant..." A few horrifying thoughts crossed her mind. "If he's been dancing around this kind of compromising position for this long, it's unlikely that he'll get into more trouble on his own."

"We'll have to provoke him somehow. Tempt him with something he couldn't possibly refuse, provoke his temper, something that shakes his control over himself."

Hannah crouched down by the bed, frowning. "I see the why of it, I just don't see how..."

"Think of the mind as a battleground, our battleground." Cynthia leaned forward. "That's where the information we need is, that's where the key to this whole thing is. But he has it fortified with years and years of defenses, so we need to shake it up a little. Make it our ground instead of his."

"Move around his mental furniture?" she smiled a little.

"Yeah, something like that."

Hannah sat in silence for a moment. "I might have an idea..."

With as much as she'd been talking to Amanda, it couldn't come as any great surprise that she wanted to talk to Rushman. The choice of venue might have startled him, a restaurant known for good food at slightly higher than usual prices, a little ambiance, the sort of place military families went to celebrate something. She dressed up a little on Cynthia's suggestion, feeling awkward in a skirt but at least no one was trying to make her out to be some kind of refined and delicate wealthy woman. And it would surprise him. Keeping him off-balance.

Battleground in the mind. She wasn't used to that, not outside of chess games or strategy exercises, but she could adapt if she had to. And she would have to, because the games started even before they met for dinner.

She called him. He offered to pick her up. Off Cynthia's head-shaking, she declined and told him she would meet him at the restaurant instead. He made a token effort at pointing out how it would be easier to pick her up, but without knowing the extent of her resources there wasn't much he could do to make a more solid argument for it.

"It gives him a motivation to push you a little more," Cynthia told her, quiet and even-voiced. "When you don't want to make a scene because he might leave you stranded at the restaurant or wherever you are."

"Sneaky bastard," Hannah muttered, but it put her on guard and gave her an idea of what she'd be facing.

He was already there when she entered the restaurant, too. Cynthia warned her he might be, to take control of his environment, with which tactic she was at least much more familiar. One of the hosts pointed out their table, towards the window, the same table he and Amanda had been at, she thought. He stood as she came towards him and even pulled out her chair a little for her. She hated that custom. It always resulted in getting your knees knocked and being awkward as you sat down because no one could get the timing right. Which was probably the idea in the first place.

"I'm glad you called, actually," he sat down opposite her once she had settled in comfortably, which took less time than he seemed to expect. "I was worried about Amanda."

"So am I," she smiled, inserting herself in the pause of breath between sentences. "She seems to think you disapprove of her friends?"

Two pronged attack, there, she hadn't needed Cynthia's prompting for either that opportunity or for the phrasing. His eyebrows arched a little and he smiled, showing a few teeth. "Of course ..." Her finger tapped against the table to count out the beats in the pause, only once. "I don't disapprove of her friends. I mean, I hardly know many of them, she doesn't bring them around often."

"I didn't say you did," she smiled, abruptly understanding as she did how his smile could look so feral. It felt as though the lower half of her face had become stiff and difficult to move in any kind of genuine warmth. "Just that she seems to think so."

"I can't imagine what would give her that impression."

"Can't you." And then she wanted to swallow that last one back, grateful that the approaching waiter distracted him. Ordering food occupied them for two or three minutes, enough time to let their words settle. She ordered something she was reasonably sure she would be able to choke down in the event he did or said something that made her lose her appetite.

After that there was a short silence, staring at each other and sizing each other up, calculating their ability to do damage. This was his type of war, not hers, and she had to be careful of her ground and her maneuvers. Then again, he didn't seem as though he was used to dealing with women like her, either. His specialty was women in a certain income bracket, and in the corporate field, not soldiers. "You shouldn't be bringing her to move in with you," she said abruptly, opting for bluntness since he seemed to favor the opposite. "You should let her alone, leave her where she's familiar with things. At most, she should be moving in with a friend. Someone she knows," Just a little bit of emphasis, there, it wasn't as though it had been very long since they'd met Rushman. "Not a near stranger."

His blink rate didn't shift, nor did he twitch his fingers or move in his seat. "It's her choice, I'm afraid. You wouldn't want to take that choice away from her, would you?"

Hannah might have said something if he hadn't added that second part, which was transparent enough for her to see it. "You know better than that. You give her ..."

"I give her comfort, and a good life. I make sure her needs are met..."

"Her needs, or yours?"

Other people might mistake that for a smile. He'd pulled it out twice in twenty minutes and she wasn't smiling anymore. "Her needs. She needs to feel safe, and maybe to hide away from the world for a little while, what's wrong with that?"

"Only the fact that the world isn't going to go away, the world is still out there, and her husband is the one who died, not her." Though what he said did strike a nerve. Or a chord. She'd spent days wanting to hide from the world, wanting not to be the stark reminder of everyone's loss. But she'd also spent years keeping a professional mask on over all kinds of feelings, and he wouldn't get that victory off her expression.

"Exactly," he leaned back in his chair as though anticipating she would acknowledge the point. "Her husband is dead. Let her grieve in her own way, Miss ..."

"Lieutenant. Commander."

Too late, she realized he'd done that on purpose. To provoke her. She was losing this battle. "Lieutenant Commander. My apologies."

Their food came. She took advantage of settling her food on her plate and her condiments on her food to compose herself again, try and find a different angle of attack. There had to be something. Possibly not something she could use in public, which gave her the next idea. "You've only known her for a few months. Are you sure you know what she really needs?"

"Are you sure that you do? It seems to me you'd be more acquainted with the needs of their husbands than ..."

He left the rest of that empty with a vague gesture that could have meant anything, but she was pretty sure it meant something nasty. Something he shouldn't be accusing her of. Something he shouldn't even have known, and just how open was that secret anyway? "Just because I work with them doesn't mean I don't know their wives," she told him, knowing she'd hesitated too long. "And just because I'm a soldier doesn't mean I don't understand that a civilian is going through some grief and needs some space to be allowed to heal." Which he wasn't giving her. Not with crawling all over her life the way he was.

"Then, shouldn't you allow her that space?" He said it gently, leaning forward as she pulled her hands back to her plate. "Let her make her own choices, do what she wants."

But they're bad choices, she wanted to say. Choices to pull away from her support network, to devote herself entirely to one man who didn't mean her anything good, things that didn't help her at all. "She doesn't know what she wants," Hannah said, unable to come up with a stronger argument quick enough.

"But you do?" His eyebrows arched, lips stretched further into a warped version of a smile. "You don't know what that's like, do you? You've always known what you want, and you've always reached out and taken it, even when it doesn't belong to you."

And now she knew he was talking about her affair with the Commander, although how he knew that she wasn't sure. Amanda was the likeliest person to have told. Or it might have been wider barracks gossip than she thought. She'd thought she was over that, over being sensitive to it, but there was no hiding that he'd pushed a button. Her cheeks flamed, the world went diffuse and sparkly as she blinked once or twice, slow and steady and not taking her eyes off of him. She decided it was a good thing that she'd ordered something she could choke down, because that was what she was going to have to do.

He sat back and let the silence be whatever it was, secure in thinking that he'd gotten the better of her. As her temper and their food cooled, the reality that there was little this knowledge could do to her set in. Those who needed to know, knew. Those who didn't could believe what they wanted. There was nothing the military could do to either of them, there was no proof of misconduct. They'd seen to that.

Rushman's face fell a little when she continued to eat without a further word, without difficulty or upset. He didn't understand what was going on in her head. He'd meant to hurt her and she had been hurt, but it was only temporary. She could do this after all, maybe.

Hannah settled back in her chair as they finished up dinner. "Perhaps we'd better talk about this some more in private," she told him, and he only blinked once. The temptation of using her to strengthen his hold on Amanda was too great. At least, she hoped it was only that.

"All right," he nodded.

They went back to his place, in a fit of either bravery or mind-boggling stupidity, she wasn't sure which. His place would give him the home territory advantage, and would keep her guard up without letting him in her head any more than she had to. In theory. And privacy was better for accusing him of manipulating people to get at least one whole squadron killed. He wouldn't listen to her about Amanda, she'd decided that much by the time they made their way to his house, and trying to convince him would only lead to him finding more soft places to poke at her. She wasn't sure she had any left. She didn't want to give him the chance to find out.

His house wasn't palatial but it wasn't exactly modest, either, and hidden from the road by tall bushes and thick trees. That alone was enough to give her a bad feeling, if only out of habit from having been in the field too recently and preferring her escape routes open and her visibility clear. The fact that there was no one else at home that she could see didn't help. It was true that most of the jobs of cooking and cleaning these days could be delegated to small, unobtrusive robots, but people who had homes this large generally also had the money to pay other human beings to do for them, even if they weren't live-in servants. Isolated, quiet, private. He unnerved her even more now.

"Drink?" he offered, after leading her into his study, a place that was either an embarrassment of riches in natural resources or made up to look like the same.

Hannah gave it a moment, then nodded, as though she wasn't sure. "All right." The Commander had lectured all of them on what to do with being offered a drink you didn't want and couldn't afford to decline. They were pilots, people bought them drinks sometimes.

She kept her glass in her hand, made sure she saw where he poured it from and that he poured himself from the same decanter. Crystal, but artificially grown, she assumed. She raised the glass to her lips and let him start talking till he failed to realize she hadn't taken a sip.

"I don't know what else I can do to reassure you, Lieutenant," he leaned up against the desk, shrugged, spread his hands like a reasonable person. "I've tried to convince you of my good intentions, but you seem determined to hate me. I've been trying to do my best by her, she's a lovely woman, and..."

"Does she know you got her husband killed?"

He didn't bat a lash. "I beg your pardon?"

"The intelligence was bad. Your firm supplied it." Which could have happened to anyone, and there would be an investigation.

"I've ordered a thorough re-check of..."

"You also pull the strings at the engineering firms that did the technical autopsy of our systems, that found nothing unusual, except one guy. He found out that four of our systems had been hit with a SR-357 rocket launcher. Now, the company that makes that said it wouldn't be in production for another year. Except that company works for you, don't they. And they have a contract with Red Requiem."

His expression didn't flicker for the first second or two. He put the glass down, which meant she had to mirror him or risk him noticing her impending sobriety. "Who told you that?" His voice stayed soft and even, but there was a different quality to it. Depth, maybe. Resonance. Danger signs.

"No one told me, I found it out on my own. How you manipulated the data. How you sold weapons to both sides against the middle, what, was it all a power play? About the money? What does that make her, then, your trophy?" His eyes seemed to darken, maybe in the light of the room, maybe just as he leaned forward and any color that might have been there fell into shadow. "We know what you did. Yes, we," she interrupted as he leaned forward and took a step away from the desk. "There's more than just me involved."

Not that it would keep her safe, she suspected. He went around to the desk and sat down and his body language, tense and erect, told her he had no intention of offering her a bribe or something. "How many?"

She gave him a look. "Don't be an idiot."

"It was worth a try." He pulled out a pistol and she didn't even blink.

"I've had guns pointed at me before, Rushman. Bigger ones, even." She couldn't help smirking a bit at the implication even if he didn't react to it. "You're going to have to try harder than that."

"I'm not going to have to try hard at all," he retorted. "We're going to go to the entrance and you're going to get off my property. And then I'm going to obtain a court order prohibiting you from coming within 500 yards of either me or Amanda. I sympathize with you, Lieutenant, I truly do, but grief is no excuse for this kind of behavior, slinging around unfounded accusations..."

"Oh, they're not unfounded," she did back up, out of his study, hands up and watching for her opening. "They're very well founded. Reports. Documents, records of transactions. Reviews. You got sloppy, Rushman. You shouldn't have tried to have us killed..."

Something in his face twitched. She didn't know what that meant. "I had nothing to do with that unfortunate incident."

"Try it on someone who'll believe you. We could ask Amanda..." And that twitch, that next twitch was palpable. She watched his face go drawn and pale. "Why does she matter so much, anyway? Why her? Why n--"

She skipped back a few steps as he advanced on her. "It's not about her," he snarled.

"No, it was always about her, wasn't it. At first it was about the money, but then it really was about her. You got all of us killed..." The enormity of it consumed her mind, made her reckless and furious. "You got all of us killed for her? So you could be with her in this messed up rendition of a relationship?" Rendition in every way possible. Everything about it was a lie, how she'd become a widow, their meeting at the event, everything.

"You weren't all killed! You were supposed to..." He stepped towards her and she moved towards him, forcing him back a couple of paces. He stopped when he realized he was losing control of the situation. "I don't suppose it matters, anyway. Soldiers caught up in the grief of getting their entire squadron killed..."

Blood pooled in her cheeks, forehead, she hadn't appreciated the literal meaning of vision going red before. Her eyes felt hot as she rushed forward, stopped only by the loud bang ringing in her ears. And by that time he'd he'd given her the opening already, coming in too close, trying to close in on her with a short-range pistol. One of the first things they learned even in basic was how to disarm an opponent. She'd trained in it until her body moved while the events of the last several seconds caught up with her mind.

"Don't try to kill pilots, Rushman," she grabbed his wrist and twisted, fingers curling around his and pulling backwards almost before she'd completed the motion. Closing up against his arm so he couldn't fire and even if he did, she was next to his gun arm now. The pistol dropped. She caught it. Twisted her wrist and fired, there was that noise again. She drove her elbow back into that aquiline nose for good measure while he stared blankly at her, eyes watering. Later she would say that she'd just meant to force his gun arm down and it went off.

Amanda would believe her. Whether or not she was happy about it, Amanda would believe that story because she didn't know Hannah well enough yet to think anything else. Cynthia would buy her a drink for that one.

"Don't ever," she took a step back, took a breath, brushed her longer-than-usual hair out of her face. And as she completed the motion and felt the shift of hot, damp fabric against her skin she decided she had better call emergency services, assuming a neighbor hadn't already. "It just pisses us off."

And that, she thought, was for all of us.

Rushman's mouth worked side to side, but all that came out were high-pitched breathy noises. Shock, she decided, the same as was chilling her skin down and making her sway on her feet. Or that might be the blood loss. She went back to the desk, one foot in front of the other, keeping an eye and the barrel of the gun on Rushman. Blood dripping down her arm onto his nice carpet, blood pooling under him where he sat slumped against the wall, it'd be a hell of a clean-up job. "Hi, emergency services?"

His eyes cleared at the mention, and he opened his mouth. She raised the barrel of the gun to his face, and he closed it again.

"We need medical to this address..." she didn't know it off the top of her head, but they'd have it in their computer. "Two gunshot wounds. One to the upper chest, not the lungs, no, I can breathe." But the room was starting to go gray around the edges. "One to, um. A more sensitive place. That's the homeowner. Yeah. What?" She'd better sit down before she fell over. "No, I can't, I have to pass out now." She didn't bother disconnecting the call, not hitting her head on the side of the desk took precedence. But it wasn't that bad. It didn't feel that bad. She wondered how much blood she'd lost. So much for applying pressure. Her thoughts drifted in and out in bursts, between trying to focus her eyes. The desk lamp filled her vision now. Everything else had gone dark. She hoped emergency services got there quick. She had to explain to Cynthia what happened.

"I still can't believe you did that," Cynthia murmured. Amanda was in the canteen getting them all dinner; Hannah was under lockdown order until the court martial. Nonetheless, they kept their voices down in case Amanda came back when neither of them were paying attention.

"He deserved it," Hannah shook her head, outwardly untroubled by what she'd done. "At least he won't be bothering anyone else that way again."

He wouldn't be touching a woman or thinking about such things for a while, not without considerably painful memories and a lot of hard-to-explain awkwardness. He wouldn't be doing a lot of things without pain right now, not for a long time. She considered that a fitting punishment, today, anyway. When she woke up again it might be a different story. She'd been visited by her psychiatrist, by investigators, by people of all types and job descriptions to make her go over the events of the night, and go over them again. It didn't seem real anymore, how many times she'd told it. They didn't press her too hard while she was in the hospital, but it'd be different at the court martial. And if she had to testify at Rushman's trial.

That investigation was quiet and ongoing, based on the information Cynthia had pulled together and tied up with a neat little confession. Rushman hadn't admitted to all of it, but there was enough to get him locked away for several years at least.

"Really, what made him think I wasn't going to somehow manage to make all that stick? I mean, what made him think I wasn't going to get that on record if I could get him to talk about it?" Hannah was having a hard time with her words, either the drugs or the speed with which everything had happened in the last week, but at least the bad dreams had eased up after she had shot him.

"I've no idea," Cynthia shook her head, and then indicated Amanda's return with a flick sideways of her eyes. "Anyway, it shouldn't take too long, should it? And then..."

Hannah shrugged. "And then I won't have to worry about where I'll go, at least. I'll be discharged. I'll have to find private work, although with what we found out..."

Amanda passed around the supper trays, smiling. Her eyes were still a little sunken but some of the color had come back into her skin, and she looked less tired. "You won't be lacking for job offers from independent companies, at least. Besides," she looked around at the two older women. "Are you sure they'll find you guilty?"

"If they were going to rule it self-defense, they would have done it now. Even if it had been, the expectation of my training is that I should know how to defend myself without resorting to, um..."

"Firearm violence?" Cynthia put it delicately as she could.

"That, yes."

"Besides," she added, with a slight headshake as they all started to nibble on their dinners. "Everyone wants Rushman put away quickly and quietly, but that doesn't mean they want a high profile pilot to get away with almost killing a man."

"The defense..." Hannah swallowed the rest of her biscuit. "The defense wants me to hold for a full court martial. The fact that he shot first, PTSD, the shock of losing my unit, they think it should be more than enough to claim justification by self defense." Odd, now, that that didn't bother her so much, using her unit like that. It would have even a couple of weeks ago. "I don't know if I want to, it's not all true, anyway." She'd gone in there wanting to shoot him. She'd spent a day or so wanting to do worse.

"The way he'd been carrying on, you damn well should be able to plead self-defense..." Cynthia snorted. "From the gun or from the sexual harassment and threat of..." she let it trail off when Hannah's breath hissed out between her teeth as Amanda ducked her head. They didn't need to talk about that aspect of Rushman here, where she had to listen and remember.

The three women ate for the next few minutes in silence, letting the subject drop. Hospital food left more than a little to be desired, but the company made it worlds away better. Cynthia startled them all by laughing a short while later, mopping up the last of her gravy with a piece of biscuit. "He wouldn't have said so in public," she told Hannah, glancing at Amanda once more for comfort's sake. "But I think he would have approved of your, erm. Ultimate solution. It was swift, decisive. Unequivocal."

"Brutal," Hannah pointed out, a little dubious. Then again, Cynthia knew him better, in some ways, than she did. And he had occasionally expressed a temper, albeit well kept in check.

Amanda smiled too, even laughed a little, as though she was trying it out again. "He's not the only one," she added. "James would have been right there behind you."

"Now that I can believe," Hannah laughed, too. "Did he ever tell you," for this she had to sit up, making faces at shifting and tugging stitches when she moved. "Did he ever tell you about the time we all managed to get out of one of those deadly boring holiday dinners, we went to this bar, I was all dressed up and we were in civvies because of some reason or another, I don't even remember. I think it was a civilian venue. And then we went to this bar, because it had to be better than rubber chicken, right? And there was this guy..."

Half made up, of course. She didn't remember as many details of the fight as she put into the story, but it made Amanda laugh. It brought back a little of James to both of them, the Flight Lieutenant and the chivalrous husband. Cynthia picked up at the end with one of her own stories about the Commander returning for a two-week leave and throwing himself into a chair like an exhausted father after a day of minding the kids. Somehow, between one thing and another, it almost felt like being normal again.

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