Marauder (Oregon Files 15)

Womack nodded. “We’ll be evacuating all of you back to Australia. The Royal Darwin Hospital is ready to treat you.” She obviously meant Sylvia as well.

“Come on,” Sylvia said. “I’ll show you the recording.”

She put on her mask and led Womack to the control room, where one of the Ocean Protector’s crew was checking on the paralyzed occupants. Sylvia smiled at her brother, who was still seated in his chair, and gave his shoulder a squeeze.

“Help has arrived, Mark,” she told him. “This is Lieutenant Womack of the Australian Defence Force. I’m going to show her what happened here, and then we’ll get you to their ship.”

He grunted in response. Sylvia sat down at a terminal to pull up the video files that had the time codes of the experiment.

She skipped past the part showing the plasma shield and played from the point just before the attack. She could see the drone dead in the water, and two people were standing at the railing of the Namaka, although the ship was too distant to identify that it was her and Kelly. She swallowed a sob at seeing her assistant.

“The person on the right is me,” Sylvia said, pointing to herself on the screen.

A moment later, the bridge of the Namaka exploded. The light was so bright that you couldn’t see the figures anymore, but she remembered her warning as Kelly ran into the ship. Another blast ripped apart the superstructure. That’s when she went into the water. Seeing it from this perspective sent a chill down her spine.

Explosions continued to rip apart the Namaka until it was a burning hulk, with a dense cloud of smoke drifting toward the Empiric’s camera. It sank into the water and disappeared.

“That was the attack?” Womack asked.

Sylvia heard the disbelief in her question and understood why. Only now as she watched the video did Sylvia see that the plasma projectiles were so fast that they weren’t caught by the Empiric’s camera. To the untrained eye, it could look as if the Namaka was blown apart from the inside.

“Where’s the attacking ship?”

“It’s coming soon,” Sylvia said. She advanced the video to the point where the trimaran came to search for survivors, but the screen went black before she got there. There was nothing more. She had reached the end of the recording.

Sylvia’s stomach went cold when she understood the reason there was no video evidence. That’s why the killers from the trimaran had boarded the Empiric. They were erasing any proof they’d ever been there. Then they sent out a fake distress call to make it look like the whole episode was a freak accident. The Ocean Protector had been on its way long before Sylvia had called Juan Cabrillo because the attackers had wanted them found.

The question was why?

“Is that all?” Womack asked her.

Sylvia simply nodded. If she told the lieutenant commander that the video had been erased, it would just add to the idea that she was either hysterical or lying.

Womack took her by the arm and eased her out of the chair.

“We’ll get you to safety,” Womack said, her voice changing to that of a parent reassuring a child.

“I want to stay with my brother,” Sylvia said, standing next to Mark.

“This is your brother?” Wom

ack asked skeptically.

“Yes.”

“Can he corroborate your story?”

“No, he was unconscious like the rest of them.”

Womack nodded as if she finally realized what was going on. “Do you think that’s what happened to you as well?”

Sylvia sighed. “Possibly.”

Maybe it was better that Womack didn’t believe her, Sylvia thought. At least when she got to Darwin, she would be considered just one more victim of the accidental gassing. Otherwise, the man and woman aboard the trimaran might come after her to eliminate her as a witness.

Womack began helping her crewman tend to the other paralyzed occupants of the control room, leaving Sylvia by Mark’s side.

He tapped on the armrest, and she translated the Morse code with his phone.