Copyright

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2018

Copyright © Elizabeth Bonesteel 2017

Cover design by Richard Aquan © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover illustration by Chris McGarth

Elizabeth Bonesteel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008137861

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008137878

Version: 2018-02-10

Dedication

For the ones we carry

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part II

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Part III

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Bonesteel

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
T minus two days—Yakutsk

Hey, Dallas! Come have a look at this.”

Dallas turned and squinted at Martine. On the nearly airless plains, the line between Lena’s brightness and the stardusted black of open space was crisp and painful, and the backlighting always fucked with Dallas’s eyes. Eye surgery might help, but that took money; and scavengers, even as experienced as Dallas, never made much money. The dealers made the money, and Dallas didn’t understand why more didn’t take their hoard and escape. After the failure of the Great Terraformer Experiment, they should have been leaving Yakutsk in droves.

Dallas wouldn’t leave. Dallas preferred Yakutsk without diffuse sunshine, orbiting Lena with nothing but its thin atmosphere and meager gravity. Dallas had spent thirty years in the domes, and had childhood memories filled with jet-black days clomping across the dusty surface of the moon in weighted boots, finding discarded shipyard parts and the occasional trash—or wreckage—from passing freighters, starships, and even Syndicate raiders, and collecting it like gold. When the terraformers had been activated a year ago, Yakutsk had become alien, and any pleasure Dallas had felt scavenging the surface had dissolved. It seemed so wasteful, forcing a perfectly reasonable moon into a role it had not been born to play. Domes were efficient. Domes took nothing they did not need. Domes made sense.

So many people had been frightened and angry the month before when the terraformers had failed, and they’d had to move back into the old covered cities. The days had grown jet-black and familiar again, and Dallas had been relieved.

The object Martine was looking at was also silhouetted by the big gas giant, and getting close enough to see would require Dallas to drop a large, ungainly fragment of cargo hull. Freighter wreckage was almost always profitable, if mundane; Jamyung, the trader who paid them most promptly, always said he wanted the unusual, but Jamyung bought more standard parts than anything else. Dallas had built an entire career off of spotting the ordinary and scavenging quickly, bringing in three times the salvage of other scavengers and making twice the money. Breaking down this chunk was going to take time, and the afternoon was wearing on. Taking a few moments to placate Martine might cut the day’s payoff by quite a bit.

Martine was new. Dallas remembered what it was like to be new, and the sting of realizing you really were in it on your own.

The fragment dropped back to the moon’s surface, sinking gently in the low gravity to hit the dusty exterior with a quiet thump. Shuffling in weighted boots, Dallas crept up next to her to look at what she held in her hands.

It was cuboid, about fourteen by fourteen by three centimeters, and entirely unadorned. In the verdant light of the gas giant it was difficult to be clear on the color, but Dallas’s unreliable eyes cast it as more or less gray. What kind of reaction was Martine expecting?

“It’s a box,” Dallas said.

Martine shook her head, disagreeing. Up close, Dallas could see the flash of excitement in her eyes. “It has no seams,” she said. “None, Dallas. It’s solid.”

“Machined.”

“Why would someone machine a random box? Besides, Dallas—feel it. It’s warm.”

“Can’t feel anything through the suit.” And if it’s warm, it’s probably radioactive, you damn fool. But Dallas ran a scan—no ionizing radiation, only thermal. And sure enough, the thing’s surface temperature was nearly 37 degrees. Body temperature. Out here in the near-vacuum of Yakutsk’s frigid, terraformless night. “Must be something inside.”

Martine was grinning. “How much do you think he’ll give me for it?”

“Jamyung?” Dallas scoffed. “Not fucking enough. He’ll tell you it’s shit, worth nothing.”

“Then I’ll keep it.”

A vague uneasiness crept up Dallas’s spine. “No, Martine. Get rid of it. Or just drop it. Leave it out here.” That seemed wrong as well, but it felt important to get Martine away from the thing. Dallas clomped back to the hull fragment and wrenched a chunk of polished alloy off of it, extending it toward her. “Take this. He’ll give you good money for this. It’ll keep you in retsina for a week.”

Of course she wasn’t listening. She was tucking the box into her pocket. Dallas shrugged and took the fragment back. “Suit yourself.” But Dallas fought a wave of amorphous dread, and no matter how superstitious it seemed, one thought persisted: That thing shouldn’t be coming back into the dome with us. It shouldn’t be near people at all.

A few hours later they took the surface crawler, heavy with the day’s haul, back to the dome. Martine was chatty, talking about dinner and the game tournament starting at their pub this weekend. She seemed cheerful, almost manic, and Dallas couldn’t stop feeling uneasy. She was herself, only … odd.

Jamyung will buy the box, Dallas thought determinedly. We can go off and have dinner and tomorrow everything will be the same.

But as it turned out, Dallas’s first instinct had been right. “What the fuck is that?” Jamyung asked dismissively, and only Dallas saw the curiosity in the trader’s eyes.

“Don’t know,” Martine said. Dallas had tried to teach her, but she was fucking awful at playing it cool.

“Fifty,” Jamyung said.

Even Martine was outraged at that. “Come on! The thing’s hot. It’s got a power source, at least.”

Jamyung picked up the box and turned it over in his hand. Dallas could see it better, here inside the dome: it was still that nondescript gray, but it had slightly rounded corners and edges, as if it were designed to be held. Something about the proportions gave it a strange sort of grace. Uncharmed, Jamyung tossed it back to Martine. “If it’s a power source, it’s a fucking weak one.” He paused. “Fifty-five.”

“Sixty,” Martine said, just as Dallas said “Eighty.”

Jamyung pinned Dallas with a look. “You guys unionizing on me?”

One for one. All the scavengers were taught that. You started teaming up, you lost all your business fast. But Dallas had to say something. “You know it’s different.”

“Different is useless.” But then Jamyung sighed, and Dallas thought something in the trader might have softened a little. “All right. Seventy. But that’s it, Martine. No more arguing, or you get shit.”

Martine kept her hand outstretched as Jamyung counted out seventy in hard currency into her palm. She set the box back down on the trader’s desk and waved at Dallas. “See you at the pub,” she said, and ran off.

Jamyung had picked up the box again and was turning it over in his hands. He noticed Dallas almost as an afterthought. “You need to stop doing that,” Jamyung said. “She’s good enough without your help.”

“You were ripping her off,” Dallas pointed out.

Jamyung tossed the box on his desk and opened a drawer, pulling out Dallas’s payment. “Sixty was a decent price.”

“Eighty was better.”

Jamyung snorted. “You’re too smart to be a scavenger, Dallas. You should be on my end.”

Dallas wouldn’t have Jamyung’s job for all the currency in that desk. “I like it out there.”

Jamyung shook his head and handed over the money. “Uninhabitable and freezing, except when we’re facing the sun, and then your env suit will melt right into your skin unless you’ve got one of the fancy ones the military are hoarding.”

“Maybe they’ll get the terraformers working again.”

Jamyung shot him a jaundiced look. “You think anybody’s going through all that again, you’re a damn fool. The surface is done. You should come in here and work for me.”

It wasn’t the first time Jamyung had offered, and it wouldn’t be the last time Dallas would refuse. “Bird in the hand,” Dallas said, and took the money.

“Suit yourself,” Jamyung said. “Go beat Martine at whatever bullshit game she’s hauled off the stream this week. And fuck, Dallas, stop telling her what her shit is worth. She learns on her own or she’s no good to me.”

“Okay.” Dallas turned to the door, then stopped. “What are you going to do with it?”

Jamyung’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you care?” And then his expression grew cunning. “You got a buyer?”

“Nope. Just curious.” Dallas lifted a hand. “See you tomorrow.”

But all the way to the pub, currency clanking and waiting to be spent, Dallas thought about that box lying on Jamyung’s desk, and couldn’t shake the feeling that, defunct terraformers or not, the days on Yakutsk were never going to be familiar again.

PART I

CHAPTER 1
Budapest

Elena ran in patient circles around the perimeter of Budapest’s largest storage bay, the space around her filled with stacked crates towering like massive city blocks. The bay would be clear in a few hours, after they dropped off the seed stock and dried roots on Yakutsk, but even then there would be little room for exercise beyond running. A freighter, she had learned over the last year, wasn’t like a starship. Starships were designed for sustaining large crews over long-term missions, and generally sported a fair number of human-centric spaces. Freighters were rarely out longer than six weeks, their crews rarely larger than ten people. Living space was not prioritized. All of Budapest’s crew quarters were small—if Bear Savosky, Budapest’s captain, operated with ten crew instead of six, she would have had to share—and there was no separate gym space.

Early on in Budapest’s venerable life, Bear had started packing cargo to leave a two-meter gap around the edges of the storage bay. Back when she had first met the freighter captain, when she was just sixteen and awed by any interstellar vehicle, even this inelegant, utilitarian cargo ship, she had remarked on it. “It was either make space for running,” he had told her, “or set the gravity to one-point-two so people can get some exercise walking across the kitchen. The last thing you want after a long shipping run is to get home and find out none of your clothes fit you anymore.”

Elena had been young, her metabolism still half child, and the statement had confused her. Now, at nearly thirty-five, she was grateful for his practicality.

Arin lapped her for the third time, and she smiled. Bear and Yuri’s adopted son was nineteen. He was also taller than she was, and so much more energetic; but he had no patience for a marathon. She watched him disappear around the corner, his heavy footfalls echoing around the cargo and off the tall ceiling, and resisted the urge to catch up with him. Controlling her natural competitiveness had been one of her hardest lessons at the Academy, but she had learned to pick a pace and stick with it, even if it was slow. The sprints she always lost, but she had done well over long distances. She had even won a few endurance runs.

But when it came down to it, she preferred dance to running. Here on Budapest, where there was no room, she missed it. With dance, time went more quickly; when there was music, it was so much easier to let her mind drift. She would be twelve weeks without dancing, out to Yakutsk and back. Running was an efficient method of exercise, but it left her restless and bored. She needed more than the mundane rhythm of her feet against the floor, and her heartbeat in her ears. She needed more than monotony.

On top of that … running reminded her of Galileo, and of Greg. Always Greg. For so many years he had been the anchor of her routine, from breakfast to duty to the gym. She used to watch him run, kilometer after kilometer, sometimes more than twenty in a day. For years she had wondered what he was running from. She had eventually concluded that he wasn’t trying to escape anything specific; he just felt the need to run. Movement. Forward. Anywhere but here.

A broken man. She had no good reason for missing him.

Arin came around again. “Slow old woman,” he said to her as he passed, and she laughed, taking off after him. She caught up, and he ran faster; his long legs brought him past her again, but not as far as he might have wanted. When they reached the inner door, he dropped to a walk, breathing heavily. In sympathy, she stopped as well.

“‘Slow’?” she objected.

“I beat you, didn’t I?” He bent down to scratch the head of the sturdy orange tabby cat seated by the door. Mehitabel, Budapest’s standoffish and ubiquitous mascot, twitched her ears irritably and continued washing her face.

“Only because I stopped.” Elena threw a towel at him.

“I’ll make sure you catch up with me next time.” He grinned at her, and blushed, and she didn’t quite know what to make of it. She had never seen him flirt with anyone, regardless of sex. Even if she had—she was nearly old enough to be his mother. She knew he was fond of her, but it had never felt like a crush.

Although … She thought again of Greg. Heaven knows I’ve never been particularly good at picking up on that sort of thing.

She had not spoken with Greg in nearly a year. She had spent six months on the CCSS Kovalevsky after the Admiralty transferred her off of Galileo, and there they had talked frequently; but when she had decided to resign from the Corps, she had told him nothing in advance. Only Jessica Lockwood—Greg’s second-in-command and Elena’s friend—had known what Elena was going to do, and she had, after some pleading on Elena’s part, kept it to herself.

“He’s going to hit the ceiling,” Jessica had warned.

“Then the Admiralty will know he had nothing to do with it.”

In her most honest moments, Elena wasn’t entirely sure that protectiveness was the only reason she hadn’t wanted to tell Greg ahead of time. She had been increasingly careful in what she shared with him, sticking mostly with conveying any intelligence she had picked up from her crewmates on Kovalevsky. She would ask after Galileo and all of the people she loved. She would ask after him, and his father and his sister back on Earth, and tell him only good things about Kovalevsky and Captain Mirov.

Telling him the truth—that being in the Corps but not being on Galileo was like flaying her skin open every single day—would have led to a conversation she did not want to have. Returning to Galileo was not an option. In Greg’s early career, he might have had the clout to swing it, but he’d lost any influence he had on the other side of a wormhole.

Becoming a civilian, she had reasoned, would give her different intelligence channels from the ones Greg and Jessica would find through the Corps. And it would be less of a daily reminder of having left behind everything and everyone, outside of her blood family, that had ever meant anything to her.

Elena kept her eyes on the cat. Mehitabel was still not reacting to Arin’s ministrations, but Elena was certain she was beginning to hear the quiet rumble of a purr. Mehitabel did not care much for Elena—possibly, Elena had to admit, because most of their interactions involved Elena chasing the cat out of the engine room—but the animal was consistently and quietly affectionate with Arin, and Elena couldn’t fault her for that. “Maybe next time,” Elena remarked, “I won’t let you get ahead in the first place.”

Arin laughed, and Elena’s comm chimed. She reached behind her ear to acknowledge. “Morning, Yuri,” she said. “What’s up?”

Yuri was Budapest’s comms officer, second-in-command, and head mechanic. He was also nominally Elena’s superior officer; but Budapest had the reflexive informality of all civilian organizations, and she had learned—most of the time—to roll with it.

“You’ve got an incoming comm,” Yuri said, and something in his voice made her ears perk up.

“Someone I know?”

“Don’t know. A parts trader on Yakutsk, called Jamyung. Bear knows him, a little—we’ve dealt with him before, but not for a couple of years.”

Elena frowned. She did know Jamyung—she knew most of the traders in the sector, having bought from nearly all of them when she was with the Corps. Like many salvage traders, he had some dubious ethical lines, but her dealings with him had always been straightforward. If he had what she needed, he charged a fair price, and she always got exactly what he’d represented. In return, she’d turned something of a blind eye to the less legal aspects of his business.

“Why does he want to talk to me?” she asked.

“He wouldn’t tell me. He sounds a little … agitated.” Yuri paused. “You want me to cut him off?”

It had been years since she had spoken with Jamyung. She couldn’t imagine why he wanted to talk to her, never mind how he had tracked her down once he realized she wasn’t in the Corps anymore. At least it’s not monotony, she thought. “That’s all right,” she said. “Put him through.”

She could picture the expression on Yuri’s face, but he completed the connection.

“Is that you?”

She recognized Jamyung’s voice: flatly accented Standard, his vowels clipped, his voice full and baritone despite the fact that in person he was slight, like most of the natives on Yakutsk. Yuri was right: he did sound agitated, and out of breath, as if he had been running before he commed her.

“Who else would it be?” she asked.

He huffed a breath in her ear. “Fuck me, Shaw, do you know how long it took me to find you? You left the fucking Corps, and nobody at that goddamned Admiralty of yours would tell me where you were. What the fuck?”

“If I’d known you were looking I’d have sent up a flare.” There would have been no reason for the Admiralty to help him, even if they could have. She used to be certain her former commanders—or at least Shadow Ops, their secret intelligence division—had kept track of her location, even after she resigned. At this point, though, she was inclined to believe she didn’t matter to them anymore. None of which is his fault. “Did you call me to yell, Jamyung?”

“No. No, no, no.” Another huff. “Not yell. But I need a favor.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re a straight shooter,” he said. “These other Central motherfuckers, you can’t trust them. And the freighter jocks—they haggle over shit like they’re fucking royalty, like I don’t know I’m the only one in six systems with that fucking field regulator they need to keep from blowing themselves to bits. Condescending assholes.”

She unraveled that. “You’re asking for a favor because you trust me.”

“Yes. Yes. Because they’ll just tell me I’m fucking nuts, and I need a fucking favor, Shaw.” He was beginning to sound frightened. “You don’t know. Lately, here, it’s been—shit.” Huff. “I am fucked, we are all fucked, and I need a favor, and I have to get rid of this thing.”

“Calm down.” She glanced at Arin, who had straightened, ignoring the cat, eyes on Elena. She gave him a reassuring smile, then stepped away, rounding the shipping cartons for some privacy. “Why are you fucked? What thing? Start from the beginning.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay.” Huff. “So you know it’s been fucked here, dome-wise, since the Great Terraformer Experiment went to hell. Fucking politicians killing each other instead of fucking doing something to help people. Same old shit my whole fucking life, because those assholes are fucking bored or something, I don’t know. Never made any fucking sense to me. And yeah, I make money off of it, usually, and why do I care if some lying dumbass governor loses some air?”

Jamyung was big on storytelling when he was trying to sell something, but he wasn’t sounding like he had parts to move. “So it’s fucked there … and you don’t care?”

“Yes. No. Because it’s not just the usual bullshit this time. This time people keep talking about nukes. Asking me if I can get them, then getting really fucking you-didn’t-hear-us-ask when I tell them I can’t.”

Nukes. On a domed colony. Shit. “Is this a reliable rumor, or just the usual mine-is-bigger crap?”

“Reliable. Solid. They keep naming a Syndicate tribe: Ailmont. They’re the real deal.”

“I’m not Corps anymore,” she told him. “I can’t stop the Syndicates from selling their own cargo.”

“Yeah, but now they’ve been fucking with me, and they keep coming back, and fuck it, Shaw, I can’t give them this thing.”

She parsed that. “Wait. You have something somebody is after?”

“Do you know what this fucking thing can do? I can’t sell it to them!”

She closed her eyes. “From the beginning. What thing?”

Huff. “Okay. Okay. I have this scavenger. Had this scavenger. Few days back, she brings me this thing she found on the surface. No idea what it is, but it’s warm, and it’s not radiating fucking poison, so she thought it must be something useful. Next day—a pack of those assholes from Baikul fucking vacates her. A good fucking scout, too, and now she’s a fucking frozen dessert.”

Vacated. Local slang for exposing someone on the moon’s airless surface. Elena gave an involuntary shiver. “Could be unrelated.”

“And then,” he went on, as if she’d said nothing, “I get an offer from some off-world trader I’ve never heard of to buy out my stock. A generous offer. A stupid generous offer, you know? Only it comes with a side order of take it or we’ll fucking kill you and take your shit anyway.”

She frowned. “They were that explicit?”

“Of course not! But it was clear. And it’s this thing, Shaw. This fucking thing. I know it is.”

“Then why not just give it to them?”

“Here’s the thing.” Huff. “I sell shit. I’ve always sold shit. Your shit, their shit, I don’t care. I have it, you need it, I’m taking your money, no questions asked. But … this thing, Shaw. I don’t know what the fuck it is, but I don’t want it in the hands of the we’ll fucking kill you anyway crowd.”

“Why not?” Ethics seemed entirely out of character for Jamyung. “What is it?”

“I just told you! I don’t know what the fuck it is. But …” She heard him swallow. “It talked to me, Shaw. It got into my head and fucking talked to me and I’d nuke it if I could, but with my luck it’s built to survive that.”

“Hang on.” She sorted through everything he’d said. If the conflict on Yakutsk was finally—after centuries of low-level squabbling—escalating into a nuclear conflict, he was right to be panicked. Nukes could destroy domes with alarming efficiency. Everything else sounded like unrelated events strung into some loosely related cause-and-effect chain generated by his anxiety.

Except the object.

“How did it talk to you? Does it have a comms interface?”

“It has no interface. It’s a fucking box. Nothing on the surface, no lights, no connectors, no nothing. Only it’s warm. Martine said it was warm when she found it, out on the surface in the fucking vacuum.”

She had to ask. “What did it say?”

“It said Get the fuck off Yakutsk, Jamyung. Smartest fucking box I’ve ever found. I need airlift, Shaw. I need someone to get me off this fucking rock before they shove me outside as well. You’re my last hope here.”

There was the drop. The story of the object was likely a shaggy-dog tale couching his request … but she had known him a long time, and despite a business model that might have pushed him to do it, he had never lied to her.

She owed the truth to him in return … but she didn’t think he’d want to hear it. Nukes on Yakutsk meant Bear would have to cancel the whole drop. Budapest was staffed with civilian freighter jocks who’d have no idea how to handle a nuclear zone, and she couldn’t protect them all on her own.

“I can’t tell you when we’re going to get there,” she said, with a pang of guilt at the prevarication. “But Galileo is close. Less than four hours, I think. Tell them we talked. They’ll take you.”

“After all this, you’re shucking me off on the fucking Corps?”

“Best I can offer.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay.” He sounded calmer. “Four hours? Okay. But this thing, Shaw. Four hours, and they’re after me, I know it.”

“Hide it then,” she told him.

“Where?”

“Do I know your workshop? Someplace nobody else knows about.”

“There isn’t—” He broke off. “Good. Yes. Good. Let them search. They won’t find it. Thanks, Shaw. Four hours?”

“Four hours, Jamyung.” She hoped Galileo would not be delayed. And that they’d be willing to offer help to a paranoid small-time parts trader.

Huff. “Thank you. Thank you. Four hours.” He disconnected.

She leaned against a storage carton just as Arin crept hesitantly around the corner. He had picked up the cat, who blinked at Elena with bored green eyes. “Everything okay?” Arin asked.

No, she thought. She turned and gave him an absent smile. “For now,” she said, not wanting to alarm him. “But I’ve got to talk to Bear.”

Bear Savosky was an enormous man. Half again larger than anyone else Elena had ever met, he had broad shoulders, no neck to speak of, and a voice that carried even when he whispered. He had a severe jaw, shrewd eyes, and an entirely bald head covered in elaborate tattoos, nearly invisible against his night-dark skin. She had known him nearly nineteen years, and over all that time she had seen both his temper and his pragmatism. She had always found him to be consistent and fair.

But she had learned, after six weeks and more culture clashes than she could count, that there were things about him she was never going to understand.

The rest of the crew sat around her at the large common-area table, listening to her relate her conversation with Jamyung. She had expected a sensible response to the nuclear rumors, including a discussion about rescheduling the drop after the situation on Yakutsk had cooled down. Instead, when she finished, they all looked at Bear, awaiting his assessment. For Bear’s part, he was watching Elena, his dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“I’ve heard these rumors already,” he told them.

She gaped at him. “Then why are we still headed there?”

“Because,” he said, straightening, “nobody has actually seen any bombs. I spoke to one shop that ordered a few just to see what would show up, and they’ve had nothing but delays and excuses since then.”

“So this is some governmental fear tactic.” This came from Naina Chudasama, the ship’s accountant, and the one Elena would have expected to be the most likely to want to leave the entire mission behind.

“That’d be my guess,” Bear told her. “But Elena’s right: we don’t know, and if I’m guessing wrong, the downside is pretty big.” He leaned back in his chair. “What do you all think?”

Good God, Elena thought, he’s letting them vote. She fought to sit still, hands on her lap under the table, where nobody could see her fists clenching.

“I think we should go,” Arin said.

Bear shot him a look. “Some of us will be staying in orbit,” he said. “And that means you.”

“But—”

“Not now, Arin,” Bear said flatly.

Arin slumped back in his chair, glowering. Elena felt a wave of sympathy for him, but she was relieved. At least Bear had heeded her enough to protect some of them.

Naina glanced at Arin, then turned back to Bear. “Whoever goes,” she said, “I agree. We need to complete this delivery. The contract only calls for us to have someone on Yakutsk accept the cargo on the record. Once we have that, the funds are released. What happens afterward makes no difference to us.”

“It’s a quick trip, then,” said Yuri. “We make the drop, get some bureaucrat to stamp the paperwork, and we’re gone.”

“Which is fine,” Elena put in, “until someone blows a big fucking hole in the dome.”

Yuri, usually so sensible, gave her a resigned smile. “If we worried about eventualities,” he told her, “we’d never deliver anything.”

Eventualities. She opened her mouth, but Bear quelled her with a look. “Chi?”

Elena knew she would get no help from the supply officer. Chiedza, taciturn and standoffish, could usually be counted on for pragmatism, but Elena, who had been watching the woman throughout their trip, had come to believe Chiedza’s background involved activities less aboveboard than cargo delivery. Chi wasn’t going to turn down a sale for what Bear apparently considered an imaginary risk.

“This is rumor,” Chi said dismissively. “We can’t call a delivery over a rumor.”

Bear was silent for a moment, and Elena beamed desperate thoughts in his direction. You’re the captain of this ship. Civilian freighter or no, you’re in charge here. Overrule them. Tell them no. Why the fuck did you ask them to begin with? “Nai,” he asked, “how much could we get on the secondary market if we skipped this drop? Theoretically.”

Naina was frowning in concentration. Elena, who was no slouch with numbers, was continually amazed at how quickly Nai could do calculations in her head. “We couldn’t make it up with what we’re carrying now,” she said. “We could resell some of it, but not enough.” She looked at Bear. “Eighteen thousand decs, three weeks minimum, and that’s if we find a buyer for the surplus right away.”

Elena could tell from everyone’s posture, even Arin’s, that her argument was lost.

She did, in the end, get a compromise from Bear: only three of them would head down to the moon’s surface. Elena and Chiedza would each pilot a cargo shuttle, and Bear would accompany them to deal with the financial validations. “The paper pushers will keep us there for a while,” he said, “but it shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours. Then we can get out of there, and they can buy nukes from whoever the fuck they want.”

They all stood to leave. Arin stalked out first, not looking at her, and her sympathy was tempered by annoyance. Even if they’d needed the extra hands—which they didn’t—after the way Bear had chewed her out over the last time she had brought the kid along on a drop, she couldn’t imagine why Arin would think she’d champion his participation. The others drifted away until only Naina was left, her eyes on the door Arin had just passed through.

“He’ll get over it,” Naina said, half to herself.

“I hope,” Elena said, “what he has to get over is a boring op he was lucky to miss.”

Naina met Elena’s eyes. She was a good deal older than Elena, perhaps close to Elena’s mother’s age, round and soft in a way so many civilians were. She was also relaxed and good-natured with a tendency to smile, and Elena had felt less uncomfortable with her than most of the people she’d had to deal with since she left the Corps. After six weeks, Elena was beginning to think of Naina as a real friend, although they had never shared anything deeply personal. Still, it was nice to have someone who would sit with her and chat about ordinary things, instead of frowning at her and reminding her, all the time, how little she knew about the universe outside the Corps.

Naina’s dark eyes were gentle, and held a bit of that maternal kindness that Elena would often see in people trying to explain things they thought she should already understand. “You know, Elena,” Naina said conversationally, “you need to stop treating us like we’re helpless just because we’re not Corps.”

Well, that was entirely unfair. “I don’t think you’re helpless,” Elena protested. “I just … I don’t understand the choices you make.”

“Because you think, for us, it’s about money. Only about money.”

“No. Not only. I just—” I think your materialism is going to get us all killed. “I think you’ve never dealt with a colony going to hell before. And yeah, I think risking your lives over money is fucking stupid. That’s my opinion, Nai. It’s not a put-down.”

But it was, and she knew it.

“I don’t think you mean it that way.” Nai’s voice had gone gentle, as if she were speaking to a child. “But you act like you’re the only one who’s ever been out here.”

“Respectfully, Nai, you’re an accountant.”

“I am. I’m an accountant who’s far from home, and who wants to get paid so I don’t have to do that so much anymore.” She smiled. “My sister’s having a baby next month, did I tell you? A girl. My mother is thrilled. And my sister could use an extra pair of hands.”

“Nai, I understand why people want the money. I just don’t get the urgency.”

“Don’t you?” Nai cocked her head to one side. “You know what happened on Mundargi all those years ago.”

Elena nodded. She had read about it; it had been a case study at Central Military Academy. “That was before I was born.”

“It was not before I was born,” Nai told her. “And it was not something I can forget, or leave behind. You have a good heart, I know. But it’s not for you to defend us all against the darkness. Even if you could—it’s not something we would choose for you to do. We choose, for ourselves, with our eyes open, with as much knowledge as you do.”

“It’s one shipment, Nai.” Elena felt like the woman wasn’t listening. “And none of that is worth dying for.”

“And yet you’re going down to the surface.”

“Well of course I am. It’s my job.”

“And you’re the only one allowed that conceit?”

“No!” She closed her eyes. “Nai, this was my whole career, this kind of bullshit. Not historical horrors that none of us can go back and fix, but this: people wanting to kill each other, and perfectly willing to take bystanders with them. I’m going down because I’m the best qualified to make sure the fewest people get killed.”

“And Chi is the best qualified to transfer the shipment, and Bear’s the best qualified to make sure we get our money. We’re not ignorant, and we’re not helpless. You’re not the only one who’s been in danger, and you’re not the only one who’s willing to take risks.” She reached out and laid a hand on Elena’s arm. “We’re not in need of rescue. And none of us are going to turn our backs on our families because things are tense on Yakutsk.”

“It’s not tense, Nai. If they’re really talking about nuking each other—”

“Do you think those rumors are true?” The question was a serious one.

Elena opened her mouth to equivocate, then sighed and nodded. “I know what Bear said, and I know it doesn’t add up. But if it’s not nukes, it’s something. Jamyung—he’s an odd one, but he doesn’t panic for no reason. Something has genuinely spooked him. We need to be careful. We need to be afraid, or we’ll die.”

And as Elena looked into her friend’s dark eyes, she realized Nai was afraid. Nai believed her, even if Bear didn’t. Nai understood the risks, and she knew they might all die in the pursuit of this delivery.

And none of that deterred her at all.

“I’m glad you’re doing the flying then,” Nai told her. She squeezed Elena’s arm briefly before she let go. “And I’m glad Bear is leaving Arin up here.”

“I don’t know that he’ll be any safer,” Elena told her, and Nai’s comforting smile turned sad.

“Nowhere is safe, Elena. Or didn’t you know?”

CHAPTER 2
Galileo

I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” Lieutenant Samaras said. “I have Meridia for you. Captain Taras.”

Captain Greg Foster of the CCSS Galileo dropped to a brisk walk, following the curve of the ship’s gymnasium track around the corner. “She say why she was comming?”

“No, sir. But … she was very cheerful, sir.”

Shit. Taras was an acutely intelligent, observant woman, with an oversized personality she knew exactly how to wield. If she had been expansive with Samaras, that meant she was discouraging him from asking questions. Which almost certainly meant something was up. “Thanks for the warning, Lieutenant,” he said. “Put her through.”

Greg stopped by the door to the locker room, where he had left a towel and a flask of water. Two of his officers passed him running the other way, nodding a greeting; Greg, in self-defense, had long since suspended rules around saluting in both the gym and the ship’s pub. He nodded in return, and rubbed the towel over his face. He was sweatier than he had thought.

Taras’s voice was in his ear. “Captain Foster. Have I commed at an inopportune time?”

Not cheerful with him—but more interestingly, not, as Taras usually was, painfully loud. Something was wrong. “Not at all, Captain Taras. Is there something we can help with?”

Another pause. “I don’t know, to be honest, Captain. I am … uneasy, and I am hoping that you can provide an alternate perspective.”

All the tension he had just run off returned. “Is this about Yakutsk?”

“Nothing so immediate, Captain. I have heard nothing from Yakutsk since our earlier meeting concluded.”

From the first news of Yakutsk’s terraformer failure, Central Gov had coordinated support and diplomatic efforts with PSI, the informal confederation of generation ships to which Meridia belonged. Both Greg and Gov’s assigned diplomat had been in touch with Captain Taras daily, discussing issues and strategies, remaining in contact with the Yakutsk dome governments to reassure them that help was coming. Not that the reassurance had made a difference; Yakutsk, stuck with limited food stores and an abruptly space-limited population, was falling prey to old political squabbles and civic unrest. The previous week, the entire Baikul government—six administrators and the governor—had “mysteriously” ended up outside the dome without environmental suits, and a new government had been installed in their place. Worse, rumors had been surfacing for days about a developing black market for pocket nuclear devices—the endgame of more colonies than Greg liked to remember.

Before he had embarked on his run, Greg had spent some time persuading the governments of both Baikul and Smolensk to refrain from any violent coups for a while. He was not confident he had succeeded.

Meridia was a day behind Galileo, and Greg had found himself wishing frequently that the PSI ship, with her separate armaments and different rules about interference, was closer. But it seemed, for now, Yakutsk was not Taras’s issue.

“Captain Foster. You are aware of Chryse, are you not?”

Chryse was the last thing Greg would have expected Taras to bring up with a Central Corps starship captain. And that, somehow, was more unsettling to him than nukes on Yakutsk.

Chryse was Meridia’s sister ship, and was known throughout the Six Sectors as the most insular, least communicative PSI ship currently in service. Greg himself, patrolling the same sector as Chryse, had only spoken with them twice in his entire career. They had been polite enough, and scrupulously efficient, but it seemed clear that Chryse preferred their relationship with Central to be distant. “Of course, Captain,” he told Taras, struggling to remember Chryse’s current location. “She’s out by the Third Sector border right now, isn’t she?”

“Actually, Captain, she is headed for Yakutsk.”

“As support?”

“One might presume that.” Greg detected sarcasm. “But we did not ask for support. More curiously, she’s sent us her first officer, Commander Ilyana, whom we also did not ask for, ahead in her own shuttle. Ilyana is in the field, half a day ahead of Chryse, and answers every attempt at contact with nothing but an automated telemetry ping verifying that her mission status is green.”

It hadn’t occurred to him that Chryse might be as secretive with her sister ship as she was with Central. “Have you contacted Captain Bayandi directly?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“And he hasn’t explained any of this?”

“Bayandi,” she said archly, “does not explain, Captain Foster. Bayandi is extremely pleasant at all times. He remembers my birthday, and the birthdays of all of my officers, and never fails to ask after my health. But he is evasive like no one I have ever met, and I include all of your Corps officers on that list.”

Bayandi, Greg recalled, had been Chryse’s captain longer than Greg had been alive. “Respectfully, Captain Taras—do you think he may just be getting old?”

“I cannot know.” She sounded frustrated. “I have been focusing on Yakutsk, and to have Chryse cheerfully deciding to participate without coordinating with us first—I am perhaps more tense than I ought to be. And …” She paused. “You understand, Captain, that it is not my instinct to trust the Corps with this information. You, however, are an individual, and I have always found you to be honorable.”

He had tensed as soon as she said and. “What’s happened, Captain?”

He heard a puff of air, as if she were preparing herself for an ordeal. “Four months ago, Chryse went dark for four days. We thought, at first, that they were hit by that same loopback virus that’s been flitting around. The one that hit you a few years back. But when they came back on line, they said nothing. We had to comm them to ask what had happened, and all we got was Commander Ilyana telling us politely that everything was fine.”

Four months. “You think this may be related to the equipment failures.”

Four months ago, the colony of Odisha had lost one of their polar terraformers. There had been a freighter in the area with replacement parts, and a number of PSI ships able to provide food and staples until the pole was stabilized, but as soon as Greg saw the hardware report on the equipment he knew what had happened. Ellis Systems, the manufacturer of the faulty part, had apologized and offered to provide a full replacement system at a substantial discount, and all was made well. But most people were unaware that Ellis, known galaxy-wide for commercial environmental equipment, was also developing weapons.

That had been the moment Greg had realized how far his own stature within the Corps had fallen. Despite applying all of his considerable powers of persuasion—despite knowing there were people within the Admiralty who knew as well as he did that Ellis was capable of using micro terraformer failures as a type of weaponry—he could not convince his chain of command to suggest to Odisha that they avoid anything manufactured by Ellis. It had been on Odisha that he and Captain Taras had forged something of a personal alliance: she knew, via her PSI channels, what Ellis had been up to, and she told him that the Fourth Sector PSI ships would keep an eye on Odisha’s new terraformer.

That was almost enough for Greg to forget how helpless he had become.

Since Odisha, there had been thirty-seven suspicious equipment failures that Greg knew of, some of which were catastrophic. Galileo had been deployed to respond to fourteen of them. But only twelve cases had provided enough data to prove—or suggest strongly—that Ellis-specific equipment was involved.

Privately, Greg had no doubt it was all of them.

“Impossible not to be suspicious,” Captain Taras agreed. “Chryse was at Odisha a few weeks before the polar issue. It’s possible she picked something up there, either that ugly loopback virus or some other malicious system worm. All I know is that they’re being entirely themselves and telling me nothing, and I’m rather tired of it. Would you be willing to talk to them, Captain? It would certainly send a different message.”

Greg was not entirely sure how to interpret that. “You want me to threaten them?”

Taras laughed. “Oh, goodness, Captain Foster. Chryse wouldn’t see you as a threat. But if you can get them to talk to you—it might clarify for them that they’re a bit farther off-grid than usual, and might want to take a little time to catch the rest of us up.”

He set aside, for a moment, the potentially troublesome thought that Chryse wouldn’t see Galileo as a threat. “So you’d like me to ask them if they need help, and let them know you’re concerned, and maybe see if I can get them to contact you with more details?”

“It sounds like I’m asking you to mediate a family squabble, doesn’t it, Captain?”

He did not believe Taras would involve him in something she thought was that petty. “I’m happy to be helpful, if I can, Captain Taras. I’ll let you know what Chryse says.”

“Thank you, Captain Foster.” And she sounded as relieved as he had ever heard her.

Later, Greg stood under the shower, organizing his thoughts, letting the water pummel the muscles in his neck. He couldn’t avoid putting the conversation into his official report; her comm would be on record already, and his command chain would want to know what she had said. But because it was neither dangerous nor related to Galileo’s current mission, he was not obligated to contact the Admiralty immediately. Regardless of his diminished influence, one thing about the Admiralty remained consistent: it paid to stay free of the sticky tendrils of Corps bureaucracy as long as possible. If the entire issue came down to nothing but a single conversation with a PSI ship, they wouldn’t be interested anyway.

Even though it’s Chryse?

Chryse, he had to admit, was different. Chryse was enigmatic on an unprecedented level. Many Corps ships had interacted with Chryse’s officers, but information exchanges were almost nonexistent. Greg had believed on some level it was because Meridia was so uncharacteristically open, and Chryse was going for balance. But the Corps abhorred opacity in anyone but themselves, and in PSI specifically. Even the most benign information on Chryse would be treated as important intel.

He rinsed off rapidly. “Galileo, how far are we from Yakutsk?”

“Three hours.”

He frowned. “How long was I running?”

“Two hours, four minutes.”

No wonder I ache. He shut off the water and reached for his clothes.

His friends often accused him of running to escape, to avoid the difficult things in his life; but in reality he couldn’t remember a time in his life when he didn’t run. His earliest memories were of sunrises by the beach, running along the ocean with his mother, his feet getting bogged down in the wet sand. She, with her longer legs, would run ahead, and then loop around to catch him from behind, sometimes sweeping him off his feet, sometimes diving into the ocean and holding out her arms, daring him to jump in after her.

But he didn’t, not often. Greg didn’t like to swim. Greg liked to run. And as often as he ran to stop thinking, he ran to ruminate, to have a space where he could turn everything over in his head when nobody would interrupt him or ask him to make a decision. Running allowed him to be alone, and these days, the moments in which he was alone were the only ones when he did not feel loneliness.

He wondered, now and then, if he should not be so used to loneliness.

He had just discarded his towel after one final pass over his short-cropped black hair when footsteps intruded on his thoughts. He looked up to find Gov’s assigned diplomat: Admiral Josiah Herrod, retired, who nodded when Greg caught his eye. “Good evening, Captain.”

“Good evening, Admiral.” Herrod, despite his nearly eighty years, was barrel-chested, sturdy, and imposing—and, Greg reflected, possibly the only person on board Galileo lonelier than Greg was himself. That was not because nobody knew Herrod, of course. It was because they knew him quite well—and thoroughly disliked him.

But nobody disliked him as thoroughly as Greg.

“Did it help?” Herrod asked him. “The running?”

Greg had, at first, assumed that Herrod’s assignment to the mission on Yakutsk was a thinly veiled threat. Before his retirement, Herrod had not only been highly placed within the Admiralty, but had been part of the Admiralty’s unofficial intelligence unit, Shadow Ops. Greg had learned years ago that Shadow Ops sometimes utilized methods that Greg—and, he hoped, most people with any soul at all—found reprehensible. He had never been clear as to whether or not Herrod condoned all of their methods, and the admiral had indeed helped Galileo from time to time; but he had also been part of the committee that had taken Greg’s chief of engineering from him, and Greg was disinclined to forgive.

But he had learned over the weeks that the man had some diplomatic skill, and Greg had grudgingly concluded that there was a good possibility he had been assigned because he was the best person for the job. In fact, he had more than once wondered why Herrod had not been sent to the Fifth Sector, where Central’s relationship with the wealthy Olam Colony was becoming increasingly strained. But Herrod’s combination of tact and bluntness had been keeping Yakutsk’s governors at the table longer than Greg would have thought possible. And for the sake of the mission, Greg could be satisfied with the knowledge that Herrod knew exactly why—and how much—Greg blamed him for everything that had happened over the last eighteen months.

“It did, thank you,” Greg lied.

Herrod pulled off his jacket and hung it on the wall. It was black, like an Admiralty uniform, but unadorned with piping of any kind. On Herrod, any jacket would look like a uniform. “Used to run,” the old man offered. “Found it inefficient. Too much time in my own head.” He cocked an eye at Greg. “Suppose that’s why you like it.”

“Suppose so.” Greg shifted; he was no good at small talk, even with people he liked. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”

Herrod’s dark eyes grew amused. “I’m not an officer anymore,” he pointed out. “Your time is your own.” But he relented with a nod. “I’ll see you in a few hours, Captain Foster.”

Greg headed for his office, annoyed, feeling he had been bested in a way he did not understand.

CHAPTER 3
Yakutsk

In the years when Galileo patrolled the Fourth Sector, Elena had been on Yakutsk more than two dozen times. Baikul, the dome facing the luminous green gas giant Lena, attracted some light tourism—she suspected the doomed terraformer project had been their idea—but she had spent all her time in Smolensk, the dome facing the stars. Smolensk was serviceable and unadorned, without hotels or restaurants oriented to off-worlders, but Elena had always enjoyed it. There was an efficiency to the place and its people, a cheerful fuck you aimed at anyone who expected any non-transactional deference. Elena had received no respect for her Corps contacts, but her knowledge of machinery and her straightforward negotiation for the parts she needed had made her solid professional allies, if not friends.

She had seen some vid of the moon’s temporarily terraformed surface. It had been beautiful: heavy on low-growing flowers and rudimentary crops, with habitats built by the wary colonists slowly beginning to spread. The atmosphere, produced by the terraformers and secured by an artificial gravity field designed to keep the solar winds from sweeping it out to space, had turned the sky a lilac-tinged blue, touched here and there with carefully regulated rain clouds. It had the look of a beginning, a seedling, the start of something that might someday become more substantial. Early days on many planets were beautiful and full of promise, but Elena had seen enough terraformed worlds to have a sense of Yakutsk’s fragility.

When the terraformers had failed, she had spoken with Jessica. They both agreed it was most likely Ellis Systems behind the catastrophe. But in truth, she would not have been surprised to find it a simple equipment overload. That the colonists had been prepared enough to maintain the domes, never mind make it back before the entire surface became uninhabitable again, suggested they had never quite believed it would all work. Smolensk, at least, was probably glad enough to see the terraformers go. In addition to ordinary building and repair services, Smolensk had thrived on selling parts found among the debris that was constantly falling on the moon’s surface. The atmospheric controls in the terraformers would have deflected much of that supply source, and Smolensk’s profits would have taken a hit.

It was no wonder the domes were at each other’s throats again.

Between the diplomatic reports and what Jamyung had told her, Elena expected a level of chaos in Smolensk. Budapest stocked no hand weapons, so none of the crew were armed. The best Elena had been able to do was make sure she, Bear, and Chiedza were all dressed in vacuum-ready env suits, hoods easily accessible in their pockets, as prepared as they could be for physical attack or attempted ejection from the dome. Even as they brought much-needed food supplies, she expected suspicion and threats, or worse.

But when they reached the colony, Elena found her fears had been misplaced. Smolensk was not chaos. It was a ghost town.

She stood next to Bear as he talked to the import official, with Chiedza behind her double-checking the supplies they’d brought against Yakutsk’s intake list. Through the windows of the small depot, she could see the city’s normally crowded streets were nearly empty. Not that they weren’t lived in—all the walkways were covered in Yakutsk’s ubiquitous red dust and littered with footprints—but she saw only three people walk by in the ten minutes she stood next to Bear.

She had seen Smolensk during political coups, a strange hybrid of anarchy and brisk commerce. She had seen drinking and fighting next to mundane business transactions. She had never seen it empty.

“I’ll need to verify this with the company,” the official said. He didn’t seem afraid, Elena noticed, but he was irritable. Ordinarily, Smolensk-level irritable. Nothing to fear?

So where is everybody?

She looked over at Bear. “When are we leaving?”

He shot her a look. It had taken her some time to convince him to let her go look for Jamyung. This might not be the Corps, she thought, but he still wants me to know he’s pissed off at me. “Three-quarters of an hour,” he told her. “Do not be late, Shaw. If you are, we’re leaving you behind.”

She headed out into the city, keeping her hand over the folded suit hood in her pocket. Realistically, she knew it was a useless precaution. If someone wanted to throw her out of the dome, they would certainly think to divest her of her hood first.

She thought of Jamyung’s vacated scout and deeply missed the little snub-nosed handgun she used to carry on missions in the Corps. She clutched the hood more tightly.

She had not seen Jamyung in more than two years, but she recognized the shop from a distance: prime real estate, not five minutes from the port, a nondescript and windowless gray building, surrounded by a massive vacant lot filled with piles of junk. Neat piles, of course: battery parts in one corner, nanopolymers in another, carefully insulated crates containing logic core pieces, and one massive bin of conduit and connectors. When she had first seen it, it had seemed like a candy store, but nothing kept outside was particularly valuable. All of Jamyung’s specialty parts were inside, in a locked basement vault that was as large as the lot itself.

She rapped on the door. “Jamyung?” she called, and tried the wall panel. The door slid open—unsurprising; these were business hours—but the lights were off. She frowned, leaving the door open behind her, and pulled a pin light out of her tool kit, illuminating the space with cool gray. The room was typically Spartan, containing only Jamyung’s desk and a chair; but the desk was askew, revealing the trapdoor to the basement vault. He had opened it—or someone had broken in. She stepped over, uneasy, and blinked into the darkness. If he was down there, he was too far afield for her to see his light. “Jamyung?” she called. Her voice slapped flatly in the low-ceilinged space.

“He’s not here.”

She started and turned, her hand going to her hip for her nonexistent weapon, then relaxed. Clearly this was one of Jamyung’s scavengers: short, slim, dark-haired, beige-skinned, and dressed in brown—deliberately nondescript. Dark eyes blinked at her, neither pleased nor bothered.

“Do you know where he is?” she asked.

“Dead.”

The bottom dropped out of Elena’s stomach. “Dead. Are you sure?”

The scavenger nodded.

“What happened?”

“He got vacated.”

Shit. “What’s your name?” she asked; and then, as an afterthought, “I’m Shaw.”

“Dallas.”

She took the offered long-fingered hand; Dallas gripped her hand briefly and firmly, then let go. Polite, she thought, and professional, just like Jamyung. “Dallas, was his vacating part of the political nonsense that’s been going on here lately?”

A snort of near laughter. “Nah. Politicians didn’t care about Jamyung. He got tossed by strangers.” The scavenger waved long fingers at her.

“Like me?”

“Different from you,” Dallas elaborated, “but still strangers. Dressed like Baikul agents, but they hadn’t grown up in a dome.”

Damn, damn, damn. It seemed Jamyung had been right about the object after all. “Do you know where he is?”

A nod.

She checked the time: more than half an hour left. The least I can do is bring him in from the cold. “Can you show me?”

A shrug this time. “Easy enough to find him. He’s not going to get up and walk away.”

To Elena’s surprise, Dallas met her at the side airlock in a full env suit, tugging a low anti-grav pallet. Despite the lack of visible grieving, the scavenger had apparently already been planning to retrieve Jamyung’s body. She was not the only one, it seemed, who had developed some loyalty to the dead trader.

She secured her own hood and let Dallas walk ahead of her to open the door. It was a passive pass-through, like they used for the shuttle docks, with a short corridor used as a buffer rather than an atmospheric generator. She waited while the outer door opened, and together they stepped out into the bleak frigid darkness that was the surface of Yakutsk.

The sky above them was black and dusted with stars, but there was a tiny glowing lip of orange-yellow peeking over the moon’s horizon, diluting the severe night sky. The gravity was far lower than it had been inside the dome, and she gave herself a moment to adjust, gripping the edge of the doorway. Dallas was clearly used to it, however, stepping forward confidently, and Elena followed with slow and careful steps, growing accustomed to the bounce. The dome’s lower windows were unshielded, and cast artificial light partway onto the flat, dusty landscape; Dallas had turned on a headlight, and Elena pulled the pin light out of her tool kit.

“He’s close,” Dallas told her.

In fact, she saw them in the shadows, less than twenty meters ahead: bodies, perhaps two dozen, in a haphazard pile. Most of them, she noted, were still wearing env suits, although they were hoodless. Torture, then: keep them alive out here to think about it for a while, and then yank off the hood.

What has this place become?

But Jamyung had not been wearing a suit. She spotted his familiar flimsy overalls, the flat soles of the shoes that had always seemed too small for him. Approaching the body, she shone the light on his face: familiar, frozen, startled, dead.

Shit.

Behind her Dallas brought the pallet. “I’ll get his feet,” the scavenger said, and positioned the skiff next to the body. Elena walked around to Jamyung’s head and slid her arms under his shoulders. Light, here on the surface; probably light inside, too. Wiry and muscly, but never large. Barely as tall as Jessica.

“You’re my last hope here.”

Damn, damn, damn.

“On three,” she said, and counted. They lifted, and laid the body gently on the pallet. Dallas made an attempt to brush some of the red-brown surface dust off Jamyung’s overalls. Whether or not it was grief, it was at the very least respect, and Elena was glad of it.

Dallas pulled, and Elena flanked the skiff as they made their way back through the airlock. Caught by an unusual bout of claustrophobia, she tugged her hood off as soon as the corridor pressurized. She looked down at Jamyung; the ice that had frozen around his mouth and nose was already melting. “He won’t last long in this warmth,” she said.

“Got a place for him,” Dallas told her, and she nodded.

And then she noticed something.

Reaching out with a gloved hand, she slipped her finger behind Jamyung’s exposed right ear. He’d worn it on his right, she was sure; she had memory after memory of him querying his comm, telling her he was taking alternate bids on what she was buying, trying to drive up the price. She’d never fallen for his trick.

But there was no comm now behind his right ear.

She checked the other side. “Did he take his comm off often?” she asked Dallas.

“A comm means money’s coming in,” Dallas said. “He wouldn’t ever disconnect.”

She looked up then, wondering why she hadn’t asked before. “Do you know—when he was killed, was there anybody in port? Like we are now?”

Dallas shrugged. “I don’t keep track of visitors. Too many.”

“You saw them take him.” A nod. “Did they scrape off his comm?”

“Nope. Grabbed him. Hauled him off. Threw him out.”

“Did he fight?”

“Wouldn’t you?” When she glared, Dallas added, “Screamed bloody murder, hung on to the doorway. Took three of them to get him out.”

The doorway. It made no difference; she doubted he would have had that kind of presence of mind. Still, he had been right about people being after him, had made the effort to locate her to ask for help … She walked up to the door and ran her fingers around the frame.

And when she pulled her hand away, a tiny, blood-covered comm strip was stuck under her fingernail.

Comms weren’t guaranteed durable storage, although many people used them that way. Anything important, anything you really wanted to keep, was better passed on to a longer-term system. Most people kept their information on the open network, encrypted with bio codes: vids, games, books, messages from family and friends. Elena, when she had been with the Corps, had saved almost nothing locally; but even so, when she resigned, she destroyed her comm strip rather than turning it in. The one she was wearing now she’d had only for a year, and it held nothing beyond ordinary comms traffic and a few vids from her mother. An older comm, like Jamyung’s, would be packed with intertwined data, but recent messages would be easy to retrieve.

And the best place to find a decent scanner that could examine the comm was in Jamyung’s vault.

Without looking at Dallas, she dropped into the hole in the floor next to Jamyung’s desk. Increasing the output of her light, she straightened, and scanned the big room. It had been, not unexpectedly, entirely tossed; but Jamyung’s diagnostic equipment was more or less where he had left it. His comm scanner was on the floor, still in one piece, and Elena wasted no time adhering the comm chip to the tabletop and flicking on the scanner.

And there it was, right on the top, recorded less than two minutes before the comm was deactivated: a message.

She tried to replay it, using her own comm to amplify, but it was encrypted. Damn. He had to have left the message for her. What would he have used to encrypt it, with little to no warning that the end was coming? A number? How could she guess? An ident code? A bio key? His own bio key would be invalid now that he was dead, and she was fairly certain he wouldn’t ever have had access to hers. Remembering his cleverness, she tried it anyway, but the message didn’t budge.

A code word, then. Something he thought she would try.

“Jamyung,” she said. And then: “Dallas.” Maybe he’d sent the scavenger to meet her for a reason.

Nothing.

Budapest. Earth. Yakutsk. Smolensk. Rat-fucking murdering bastards. None of them worked. She was running out of time.

And then it came to her, certain and obvious.

“Galileo,” she said, and the message began to play.

“They’re here,” Jamyung whispered. Wherever he was, he was in hiding; she heard bangs and crashes around him. “They won’t find it. Don’t let them get it. It’s in the back, in the compost. Well, it was compost. The cats get at it now. Take it out of here, and don’t let them know. I don’t know what the fuck it is, Shaw, but you need to keep it away from these bastards. It won’t help them, not on purpose. But maybe it won’t have a choice. Don’t give them the chance, Shaw. Don’t—”

Jamyung took a gasping breath, and the message ended.

Elena sat back on her heels, thinking, pushing aside a wave of sorrow at the trader’s death. She still found his description unconvincing, and his anthropomorphizing of this unknown object didn’t change her mind. But he’d died for something, and whether or not the thing was really talking to him, someone had thought it was important.

She wanted to know why.

She checked her comm; she had twelve minutes before Bear would expect her back. She stood, and turned to Dallas. “Where’s the compost heap?”

CHAPTER 4
Galileo

Greg rarely used the off-grid anymore. Earlier in his career, it had been a last-ditch method of communication with parties he was not officially supposed to be contacting: PSI ships, off-schedule freighters, even—occasionally—Syndicate raiders, although in those instances he was almost always delivering some sort of threat disguised as compromise. As a general rule, if he could provide the Admiralty with a positive result, they didn’t much care if all his negotiations were on the record with Galileo’s comms system or not. The off-grid allowed him to use tactics of which the Corps would not have officially approved.

The Admiralty would know, if they cared to check Galileo’s logs, when he had spoken with Captain Taras, and what she had asked him to do. They would not know when—or if—he had managed to contact Chryse unless he chose to tell them.

Greg went through the door connecting his office with his quarters and let it sweep closed behind him. Some of his pent-up tension evaporated in the silence. He was aware it was an odd room, given how long he had lived in it: unadorned with vid, picture, or artwork of any kind, nothing personal except a few physical books his mother had left him when she died. For years, the Corps-issue dresser had held a still picture of his wife, and he had kept it long after he had realized he had no love for her anymore, long after he had resigned himself to hanging on to a marriage that meant nothing to him. Getting rid of it after their divorce had felt freeing, but also disorienting. Some days he walked in still expecting to see her looking back at him, pale and beautiful and not at all what he wanted.

The books, which were a more fond reminder of the tendrils of the life he still had outside the Corps, held half the off-grid, with the other half tucked under his mattress. He kept it in two pieces, just in case. As far as he knew, the only other people who knew its location were Jessica Lockwood, his second-in-command, and Ted Shimada, Galileo’s chief of engineering. He trusted both of them to keep it to themselves.

He retrieved the two clear polymer sheets and slid them together, laying the unit on the top of his dresser. It pulsed once, an almost subvisual wave of deep purple, and he keyed in Chryse’s ident. Greg’s off-grid would show up as Galileo on the other end, unless Chryse had more detailed data from the last PSI ship that had received communications from this unit. That ship—Orunmila—was in the Third Sector, and it occurred to him that, among all of the questions he might have asked Taras, he should have asked how much of PSI’s intelligence about the Corps they shared with each other. It might have saved him a considerable amount of time.

Long ago, when he was young and innocent, he had been irritable that PSI seemed so suspicious of Central. At this point in his career, he knew better.

An off-grid comm often languished for a long time, sometimes hours, before it was acknowledged, but Greg’s signal was picked up almost immediately. “Galileo, this is Captain Bayandi of the starship Chryse. To whom am I speaking?”

And didn’t that set Greg back on his heels.

Captain Bayandi.

Captain Bayandi.

Nobody spoke with Captain Bayandi. It occurred to Greg there was probably no way even to verify the man’s identity. Every meager interaction Central had ever had with Chryse had been through subordinates. The voice was baritone, cautious, but with overtones of genuine warmth. Welcoming, Greg thought, which fit nothing he knew of Chryse at all.

Regrouping, he introduced himself. “This is Captain Greg Foster of the CCSS Galileo. I hope I’m not disturbing you, Captain.”

“Not at all, Captain Foster.” No hesitation. “What can I do for you?”

Tell me who you are, Greg thought. Tell me what your ship is. Tell me about your crew. Tell me why you never talk to us. Tell me why you never talk to your own people. “I’m contacting you at the request of Captain Taras,” he said.

“Is she all right? Is Meridia in danger?”

Instant concern, and convincing worry. In so many ways, this was not the conversation Greg had thought he would be having. “Meridia is in fine shape, Captain,” Greg assured him. “And I spoke with Captain Taras a little while ago. She is in good health and spirits. But she’s concerned about your ship, and asked if I could speak with you.”

“I don’t understand. We spoke with Captain Taras yesterday. Commander Ilyana should be arriving at Meridia in just a few hours.”

Greg would have expected annoyance; Bayandi only sounded confused.

“I don’t want to speak for her,” Greg said carefully. “But I have the impression that she’s still worried about your comms outage a few months ago, and the reason for Commander Ilyana’s trip.”

Bayandi was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said at last, and he sounded resigned. “I should have given Captain Taras more detail. I apologize for the need for your involvement, Captain Foster.”

Taras was right; it felt very much like a family squabble. “Don’t be concerned about that, Captain,” he said. “May I ask—is there something we can help you with? Yakutsk notwithstanding, I have some maintenance people I can spare if they would be useful.”

“That is very kind of you, Captain,” Bayandi said, impeccably sincere. “There is nothing for you to help us with. Ilyana should be able to answer Taras’s questions when she arrives, and we’ll join you at Yakutsk twelve hours afterward. Do you know, yet, if there is anything specific you will need?”

“No, Captain, but thank you.” Greg frowned. Pleasantries, Taras had said, and it had annoyed her. He was understanding how she felt, but he had no standing to demand answers or details. A PSI ship the Corps had rarely contacted was unlikely to willingly disclose damage information. And if Bayandi had personal reasons for shutting out Captain Taras—that was not a relationship Greg could mediate.

On the other hand … Bayandi had offered advice, and that alone might be telling.

“Captain Bayandi, if you have a moment, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the tactical situation on Yakutsk.”

If the PSI captain was surprised by the question, he betrayed nothing. “They’ve been fighting among themselves for a long time,” he said. “The terraformer project—its inception as much as its failure—has widened long-standing schisms. There is a great deal of anger there, and unkindness. It seems fixed in their culture. But it is not all of them. There are individuals …” Bayandi trailed off. “I think we must be very careful, Captain Foster,” he said at last. “I think we cannot underestimate the need of a subset of the population to feel a sense of control and organization. Yakutsk’s strategic importance is a double-edged sword. It brings them pride, but there are many people there who have killed for power, and will kill again. They are not the people who will help us, and I think attempting a dialogue with them is, at best … procrastination, shall we say?”

“You think we need to start building civilian allies, rather than dealing with the government.”

“The government on Yakutsk may have changed again before you arrive there. Negotiating with the government will accomplish nothing.”

It was a different direction than Greg had been considering. It was also far less well defined, but he felt, for the first time, a glimmer of hope. “Thank you, Captain,” he said honestly. “I’ll discuss your thoughts with my colleagues.”

“And I will contact Captain Taras immediately,” Bayandi promised. “I am sorry that we have worried her. You may rest assured, I will resolve the issue. Thank you, Captain Foster.” He ended with something curious: “I hope we will talk again.”

Greg folded up the off-grid thoughtfully. Even if he had anticipated speaking with Bayandi … the man was not at all what Greg would have expected. Despite his age—reported by some as being north of ninety—he had been lucid and attentive, no waver or uncertainty in his voice. Had Greg not known Bayandi’s history, he would have seemed a typical PSI commander.

Greg was missing something. But PSI being PSI, he was unlikely to ever learn what it was, even from Taras.

The door chime went off, and Galileo flashed his visitor’s name before his eyes: Commander Lockwood. He shook off his thoughts on PSI. Those worries could wait until they had stabilized the situation on Yakutsk.

“Good evening, Commander,” he said, when she walked in. “What can I do for you?”

Jessica Lockwood stood, not precisely at attention, but with the same compact ease she did nearly everything. She was a small woman—very nearly too short for the Corps, and he had taken care never to confirm her recorded height—impeccably beautiful, and always assembled with flawless military precision. She had a head full of curly red hair that she managed to tame back into a symmetrical bun, and shrewd green eyes. Most people noticed only her round-cheeked beauty when they met her, and missed the deep intelligence in those eyes—and the set of stubbornness in her lips. She had been his second-in-command for two years now. He had argued with and raged at her as he had to no one else ever in his life, and he loved her unreservedly, as much as he loved his own sister. He did not think he could have found himself a better first officer anywhere in the Corps.

“I’ve got some news on Yakutsk, sir,” she said. She did not look him in the eye.

Greg knew what that meant.

Before he had promoted her to commander—indeed, long before she had enlisted in the Corps—Jessica had been a dangerously skilled recreational hacker. Having taken an oath to obey Corps regulations, she was generally loath to use her skills in a way that might have been interpreted as illegal. But ever since they had begun secretly investigating Ellis Systems, he had told her to get her intelligence any way she could. He had not been explicit, and she had not been forthcoming; but he knew a great deal of what they had discovered was unlikely to have been obtained by official means. Including, apparently, whatever she needed to tell him now.

“Off the record,” he assured her. “What’s up, Jess?”

Immediately she relaxed, all of the military draining out of her. She began pacing the floor of his room. “It’s Baikul again, Greg,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Oarig, the perpetual amateur.”

Oarig, governor of Baikul, had only had the job for two weeks, having obtained it by summarily ejecting his predecessor and her cabinet from the office—a move widely anticipated after the terraformer failure. While this was not an atypical method for Yakutsk to change governing bodies, Oarig’s qualifications were difficult to understand. He was short-tempered, entitled, and inclined to violence. Greg was not entirely sure how he had amassed enough dedicated followers to kill for him.

“They’ve got wind of a food drop at Smolensk,” Jessica told him, “and they’re threatening to steal it.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Oarig, of course, having no trust in the fact that the supplies are going to be shared.” Which was not entirely unreasonable of him, despite his hair trigger—Villipova, the governor of Smolensk, was not above denying Baikul resources she had previously agreed to distribute evenly.

Jessica shrugged. “Hard to say. He’s paranoid, sure; but really, Greg, I think he’s just been planning a coup for so long he doesn’t know what else to do with himself.”

Which, Greg thought, made a succinct summation of Oarig’s personality. “Budapest dropped the cargo yesterday, didn’t they? So we need to figure out how to alert Villipova without—”

“Actually, sir,” Jessica interrupted, “Budapest is still there.”

Well, hell.

He turned away from her. Most of his crew considered him stoic, even cold; but Jessica could read him too well. She would know what he was thinking. He didn’t need her to see it in his eyes as well. “They should have been out of there ten hours ago.”

“They got delayed,” she told him. “They did airlift assist at Govi. There were … complications.”

“Anybody get hurt?”

“Not those kinds of complications.”

He knew instantly what had happened. Airlift assist meant hands-off recon. Civilian freighters often served that purpose during an evac, using pilots of various experience levels to scan a colony’s surface for people in distress. The protocol was to notify the lead airlift ship when a group was found, and move on.

But Elena would never have left anyone in trouble.

“We’ve got to tell Savosky.” He headed through the inner door to his office, Jessica at his heels. “He needs to abort that cargo drop.”

He heard her step behind him. “I talked to Yuri a few minutes ago. They’re already down on the surface. Import is arguing with them about where they want the cargo delivered.”

“The correct answer,” Greg said, “is they leave it where it is and let Smolensk sort it out.” Civilians. Dammit. He hit his internal comm. “Samaras, get me Budapest.”

But Jessica wasn’t finished. “You’re not going to talk them out of it,” she said. “I tried. If the import office doesn’t certify receipt, they don’t get paid.”

“And they’re willing to risk their lives for that?”

“Apparently so.”

Shit. “Belay that last order, Samaras,” he said, and instead commed Emily Broadmoor, his security chief. “Emily, I need a shuttle and a security detail.” He met Jessica’s eyes. “How far are we out?”

“Twenty minutes,” she told him.

“Twenty minutes,” he said to Emily. When she acknowledged, he turned back to Jessica. “I’m going to get Herrod. Might as well at least maintain the fiction of having diplomacy on the table. You—” He stopped. “Contact Savosky. Tell him we’re sending backup.”

“Yes, sir. Greg—”

He met her eyes. “No time for that now, Jess,” he said, and after a moment she nodded.

“I’ll alert Savosky, sir.” She turned and left.

Greg left the office and headed back to the gym, putting all the pieces together in his head. Savosky had dropped cargo in some pretty ugly places in the past, and he was well aware of the political situation on Yakutsk. If he was moving forward despite Jessica’s warning, then the payoff must be genuinely impressive. Savosky was not naive, and he was not helpless.

And he had at least one pilot who wasn’t a civilian at all.

Past is past, Greg told himself.

But it wasn’t, and he knew it.

CHAPTER 5
Yakutsk

Bear’s nose wrinkled. “Elena, what the hell am I smelling?”

Elena looked down at herself. Her once pristine env suit was covered in the red-gray dust of Yakutsk’s exposed surface, and her arms were caked up to her elbows with muck from the heap of organic material through which she had been digging for the last ten minutes. Her own nose had stopped working shortly after she started, and she was grateful; she didn’t think she could otherwise have done the job without getting sick.

“Compost,” she said. “Also, cat excrement. I think.”

“There some big reason we’re all going to have to sit with that on the way back to Budapest?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the container she had found buried in the garbage. “Jamyung’s dead,” she told him. “And this is what he left me.”

“He left it to you buried in cat shit?”

She tucked it back into her pocket. “It’s a long story,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

She had heard him shouting as she came up the road, his bellowing punctuated by barely audible, utterly unconcerned responses from the import official. When she arrived, the official was walking out the back door, the office itself dark.

Bear grew serious. “We’ve got two problems,” he told her. “First, they want the cargo dropped at the cultivation dome. Second, the Corps has intel suggesting Baikul wants to steal the cargo. I’ll leave the exercise of which is more important to the pilot.”

She raised her eyebrows. Since the population had moved back into the domes, everything on the surface was disputed territory. The cultivation dome itself was jointly held, but they would have to fly over a substantial amount of open landscape to get there, which would expose them to any ground-to-air fire Baikul chose to throw at them. Worse, the cultivation dome had no established infrastructure or procedures for docking a large-scale cargo ship. They would have to unload cargo without any environmental controls, doing all the work in env suits. They would be almost completely defenseless.

She felt a tingle in her spine. She had been trained for this.

“Let me fly it alone, Bear,” she said. When he looked away, she pressed her argument. “Out in the natural gravity, the size of those cargo crates isn’t going to bother me at all. I’ve got the training to fly this kind of mission.”

“Chiedza’s flown combat,” he said.

“Not like this.” Elena didn’t think the combat Chiedza had flown would have involved much defense. “There’s no reason to put everyone through this. Pull the extraneous crap from one shuttle, pack all the cargo on it, and I’ll take it out and be back within the hour.”

He was still frowning, but she could see it on his face: he knew this was his best choice. Curtly, he nodded. “No risks, though,” he added, unable to resist one last admonishment. “And no detours. You drop that fucking cargo and you get the fuck out. Understood?”

“Understood.” And for the first time in a year, she felt like she had a real purpose.

She hauled the extra seating out of one of Budapest’s two shuttles as Bear and Chiedza shifted their half of the cargo into her ship. It was snug, but they were able to fit it all in. She squeezed between the massive bins of grain and parked herself in the pilot’s seat, pulling on her env hood. When she landed, the fastest way to offload the cargo would be to vent the cabin and repressurize later, and she wanted to spend the briefest possible time on the surface.

She flew the great circle route over what passed for a pole, and was treated to an aborted sunrise as she maneuvered toward the side of the moon sheltered by the gas giant. The shuttle’s sensors swept as widely as they could, looking for movement and potential attackers. The mechanism had less scope than she was used to, but she comforted herself by realizing that the darkness on the dead surface would make it nearly impossible for a large group of people to conceal any guidance lighting.

Assuming, of course, that they needed lighting after a lifetime exploring the moon’s surface.

As she understood it, there were generally no more than five people living in the cultivation dome at one time: a botanical expert and a chemist, a single medic, and one or two horticulturalists, all ensuring the safety and nutritional value of what was being grown in the limited space. They would, she had been told, be expecting her, although she was anticipating they’d be nervous. Purges had been nearly nonexistent during the terraformer experiment; for the ordinary citizens, who had been just beginning to relax into a new life, this would be a jarring return to an uneasy past they had hoped to leave behind. Those were the people she thought of at times like this—not the dome officials, pointing fingers at each other, so caught up in paranoia that they would kill their own without a thought. Most of the people wanted nothing more than their old, comfortable lives back.

She thought of Jamyung, and tugged the container out of her pocket. It was vacuum-sealed, designed to freeze whatever was inside into inertness. Such an environment could wreak havoc on machine parts, but whatever this thing was, it had survived the moon’s surface, and the cold shielding would have made it more difficult to find using conventional scanners. Almost absently, she touched the opening mechanism and the lid lifted, revealing exactly what he had described: a cuboid, gray and smooth with rounded corners, its proportions squat and pleasing.

He died for this. Or believed he had.

Curious, she tugged off her glove and held her palm over it. She could not tell how warm it was, but after a vacuum seal, it should have radiated at least a little bit of cold. She frowned at it, and then, on impulse, she brushed one finger along the surface. It was warm, like skin, smooth and unyielding, and she wondered what kind of polymer it was. Something sophisticated, certainly, that could withstand such extreme temperatures. Or perhaps the polymer was encasing something, although Jamyung hadn’t mentioned that. He would have had it under a scanner, she was sure. Odd that he hadn’t—

Without warning, a signal came over her comm, a deafening jumble of sounds. Words, music, shouting, white noise, machines; she could not sort any of it out. There was a rhythm beneath it all, and it built, taking on melody, creeping into her mind, singing one word, over and over again: Galileo … Galileo … Galileo … louder and louder and—

There was a lurch, and an alarm, and she reached back to the controls, cursing. She should at least have put the damn ship on autopilot. She wrenched the shuttle back to level and heard her cargo slide, the crates knocking into each other.

And then someone said, “Ow!”

She turned, reaching instinctively for her nonexistent weapon. “Who the fuck is there?” she snapped.

“It’s only me,” Arin said. He crawled out from between two crates, rubbing his head. “Do you have to fly so rough?”

Shit. “Arin, what are you doing here? Did you have some fugue where you missed the bit where Bear told you to stay on Budapest?” At least, she observed, he’d had the brains to pull on an env suit.

“I’m here to help,” he insisted. “And don’t tell me you couldn’t use the extra hands.”

No, no, no. This was wrong. “No, Arin, I could not use the extra hands. Fuck.” She turned her back to him. The box had fallen to the floor. Hastily tugging her glove back on, she picked up the box and closed it, slipping it back into her pocket. “I need to do this alone so I don’t have to divide my concentration making sure you stay in one fucking piece!”

She caught sight of another energy signature and turned again. Behind her, she heard him stumble. “Well I’m here now,” he said. “What can I do to help?”

She should never have befriended him. She should never have befriended any of them. Fuck. “Get in a fucking seat,” she told him between gritted teeth, “and strap yourself down. You’ll do me no good if you fly into my head while I’m trying to land.”

Arin pulled himself into the copilot’s seat, fastening his harness, and her anxiety eased a little. At least he wouldn’t break his neck on the way down. She was fairly certain, though, she would break it for him once they got back to Budapest.

Right before Bear broke hers.

“What’s the plan?” he asked her.

“The plan is we get fifty meters from the cultivation dome,” she told him, “we drop the cargo, and we get the fuck out.”

“No verifying pickup?”

If she had been alone, she might have scanned for ships, set a beacon, commed them to make sure they knew where to look. “The import official agreed. We drop the cargo and we leave.” She shot him a glare; he was still grinning. Dammit, he wasn’t bothered at all. A Corps ensign would have had the brains to stop smiling and restrict all his responses to “Yes, ma’am” for the next six or seven years of his career.

Beneath them, she caught the distant lights of the cultivation dome—along with a much stronger energy indicator. Before she could dodge into the moon’s shadow again, the shuttle sounded a quiet alarm and said, “We are being targeted.”

Big fucking surprise. “Evasive!” she shouted, and keyed in a command to the ship’s autopilot. The energy pulse swept past them silently.

Beside her, Arin began unstrapping himself. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’ll get the cargo ready for the drop.”

“Arin—”

“I’m here, Elena. Let me help.”

Stupid. Damn kid. “You hook yourself onto the wall,” she told him, “and you keep your head away from the open door, do you understand? They will be firing on us. This isn’t make-believe. This is fucking war.”

She kept her eyes on their attackers as she heard him pull one of the attached lines out of the wall and hook it securely around his waist. She heard scraping as he began shoving the cargo to one side, exposing the ship’s side door. If she got low enough, she could open the door, and he could shove the containers out, one by one. Twenty seconds, tops. Maybe less.

“Two minutes,” she told him. “Stay behind those containers, dammit. Keep covered.”

But before she could steer them lower, the alarm came again. “We are being targeted,” the shuttle repeated calmly. On the tactical display, she could see the small lights moving toward them from three directions this time. Too many, and far too fast.

“Hang on, Arin!” she shouted, and took the controls back to manual. One of the shots would miss, she could see; the other two seemed to be homing in on them. Different firing systems, then; their attackers were neither experienced nor properly prepared. Which doesn’t mean their strategy won’t work. She watched the faster shot get closer and closer to them, and as it closed in, she rolled them abruptly to one side. She heard the containers shift, and the missile swept past them.

But the second detonated not thirty meters from their undercarriage, and they were suddenly pitched forward, nose toward the ground, the ship’s engines groaning as they attempted to compensate. “Arin!” she shouted.

“I’m okay!” he shouted back. “Elena, just get—”

They hit the ground nose-first, the front window slamming into the dirt, obscuring her visibility entirely. The harness kept her from dropping onto the ceiling as they skidded upside down through the frozen dust, far faster than they should have; the engines were whining, trying to soften the landing, and she thought they had been damaged. In an instant, though, the engines no longer mattered: they slammed against something she couldn’t see, she jerked roughly against her harness, and the engines shut down.

“Arin?” she said, unbuckling herself, her feet dropping onto the ship’s ceiling. “You still hooked in?”

There was silence, and everything in her went cold.

“Arin!” She rushed toward the containers. Where they had been carefully lined up on the floor they were now tossed about the ceiling like huge squares of confetti, on top of each other and in corners, a few broken open, seeds scattered. She saw the safety cable behind one of them and grabbed it, pulling; it resisted. She shoved at the container covering it; the heaviest of them was ninety kilos in this gravity. If she braced herself against the wall she should be able to shift it. Squeezing between the container and the wall, she positioned her feet and set her shoulders, then took a deep breath and shoved. The container slid reluctantly away from her, and fell off to the left.

Arin was crumpled against the wall, unmoving.

She rushed to him, careful not to shift him. She could see his chest rising and falling rapidly, and she felt a glimmer of relief. Where was the damn med scanner on this ship? Under a pile of containers, she realized; she would have to rely on her rusty field training. Pressing her gloved fingers against the thin fabric of his suit hood, she took the pulse in his throat; a little fast, but steady enough. She cleared the debris away from him, trying not to move him, unsure of where he had been hit and how hard. His nose was bleeding; it was clearly broken. As she was running her hands carefully along his arm, he stirred and groaned.

“Sit still,” she told him sharply.

“What,” he said.

“We’ve crashed,” she told him. “You got hit with a container. Be still; I don’t know how badly you’re hurt.”

He opened his eyes; both pupils, she noted, were even. His concussion couldn’t be too bad. “Why’d they shoot at us?” he asked, coherently enough.

“Because they don’t want us here.”

He looked confused. “We’re bringing them food.”

“We’re interfering in local politics.”

“Don’t they need us?”

Now was not the time for a lesson. “Lie still, Arin. I’m going to see who I can contact.”

She made her way back to the front of the ship and managed to pull up a rudimentary console. No comms at all, but the environmental controls were still on: air, temperature. They could breathe, at least.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t shoot, and she cursed. If she’d been running this mission off of Galileo, she would have been carrying a sidearm. There would have been half a dozen pulse rifles in the cargo hold, just in case. Fucking freighters.

They were lying here, upside down in the dirt, and they were helpless.

CHAPTER 6

You don’t have to come, sir,” Greg had told Herrod. “I’m guessing there’s going to be more shouting and denials than discussion this time.”

Herrod had given him a familiar look of mild amusement. “Shouting and denials require diplomacy, too, Captain,” he had pointed out. “And while I may not be able to throw my weight around anymore”—here he gestured at Greg’s assembled security detail, eight armed soldiers of considerable size—“I can still sling a pulse rifle if the situation calls for it.”

Greg had the distinct impression Herrod was having fun.

In the end he had settled for a single platoon with two senior soldiers: Bristol and Darrow, both of whom he knew well, both of whom knew how to be unobtrusive when they needed to be. “With any luck,” he told the platoon, “this is a false alarm, and you’ll all be nothing more than pomp and circumstance. But keep your eyes open, and stay on your toes.”

He could have taken a pilot, or at least a cabin crew, but Greg was fond of flying, and as the ship’s captain he rarely got a chance to do it. Herrod had the good sense to settle himself in Sparrow’s passenger cabin instead of sitting copilot, so Greg had the space to himself. Sparrow was an easy shuttle to fly, smooth and responsive, and Greg almost never engaged the autopilot, even when it would have freed him up to do something else. He could watch the stars, see the moon advance through the front window, while keeping an eye on surface scans and nudging their direction now and then.

Almost as relaxing as running. He smiled.

Oarig had denied any plans to intercept the food drop. “Why would we interfere with a commercial shipment?” he asked, and Greg had no rational answer. He hadn’t pointed out that few of Oarig’s actions since his precipitous installation had made commercial sense. If Oarig was preparing some sort of ambush, it spoke of inexperience. The Admiralty had no intelligence on Oarig, but Greg was guessing, based on his appearance, that if he was more than twenty it was not by much. Not enough time to learn real politics, no matter how young he had started.

In contrast, Villipova, the governor of Smolensk, was a grim-faced woman of fifty-four, used to occasional violence, but reasonably skilled at dealing with corporations and trade. Greg had dealt with her under less stressful circumstances, and had found her unfailingly practical, if not prone to overtures of friendliness. During their negotiations she had seemed tired and irritable, and had struggled with letting Oarig speak his mind. She clearly thought the Baikul governor was foolishly inflexible, and much of Greg’s challenge had been getting her to listen long enough to understand the areas where Oarig was open to compromise.

When he had briefed Commander Broadmoor on the tactical situation, he had told her to expect both domes to be coordinating attacks on each other. “This attack may just be the start,” he’d said. “Keep the troop shuttles on deck, and your people ready to go. And if you detect anything more radioactive than a thorium mine—you alert me instantly, understood?”

Greg had no doubt Oarig would revel in Central sending infantry to Smolensk, but he doubted the governor would sit silent when Baikul received the same treatment. Greg’s orders to Emily Broadmoor had been clear: she was to deploy the others if—and only if—she thought a show of firepower was the only way to prevent the colony from blowing itself up.

They were still ten minutes out from the dome when Commander Broadmoor commed him. “Sir,” she told him, “we’re showing some activity on the surface. Pulse rifles, and what looks like a wreck.”

Here we go, he thought. “Any distress calls?”

“Hang on …” She was silent for a moment, then: “There’s a beacon, sir. It’s a cargo ship off of Budapest.”

Greg hit Sparrow’s comm. “Savosky?”

“This is Yuri Gorelik. Captain Foster, is that you?”

Savosky had not yet returned, then. “We’re getting a beacon from one of your shuttles down here. Looks like they got caught in some surface fighting. Are you in touch with them?”

“No, Captain, we’re not.” Gorelik sounded concerned. “Captain Savosky is on his way back right now. Shaw was supposed to be making the cargo drop.”

“On her own?” The question came out before Greg realized what he was asking. Of course Elena would have managed a way to do it on her own.

But that wasn’t what was worrying Gorelik. “She was supposed to be alone,” he said. “But it seems we’re missing our other mechanic. Arin Goldjani. Captain Foster—” There was a pause. “He’s nineteen. Not experienced. He was meant to stay here for this mission. We think he stowed away.”

He was also, Greg knew, Yuri and Bear’s adopted son. “Are you getting anything from them at all?”

“Just the beacon, as you are.”

Shit. “The colonists must have a local jammer,” he said. The alternative—that the crew could not respond—was unthinkable. “Your cargo ships don’t carry weapons, do they?”

“No, Captain.” Gorelik’s voice was grim. “They do not.”

Greg was changing course even as he commed Jessica. “Commander, get in touch with Oarig and tell him if he’s got anything to do with shooting at fucking civilian freight ships trying to bring his own people fucking food, this is no longer going to be a neutral negotiation.”

Jessica got the point quickly. “Is it Elena?”

“Of course it’s Elena. And apparently some green kid who followed her down.”

Jessica swore concisely. “On it, sir.”

Admiral Herrod appeared at his elbow. “Problem, Captain?”

“We need to divert, sir,” Greg said. “Someone shot down a cargo carrier. They’ve put up a distress beacon, but Budapest can’t contact them.”

He waited for Herrod to lodge a protest, or at the very least grant permission; but it seemed Herrod had grown accustomed to his retirement. “What’s our strategy?”

“Our strategy,” Greg said, loudly enough for the others to hear, “is to clear the comm signal, get to the civilian vessel, and avoid deadly force as much as we can. Which means we threaten the hell out of them and get them to stand down long enough for us to get our people out. Darrow, Bristol?”

“Sir,” they said simultaneously.

“You perceive a credible threat that you can’t disarm, you defend, understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

He kept Sparrow on a clean vector and watched for the shuttle’s telemetry: it seemed to have some power, and he held out hope Elena was all right. After several minutes, the wreck appeared on the horizon, and as they grew closer, he saw enough to feel relief. The shuttle, intact but flat on its back, was surrounded by massive cargo bins: the food the colony so sorely needed. Without weapons—why the fuck do freighters drop in war zones without weapons?—she had defended her ship with the only leverage she had: the cargo they were trying to steal.

“Sparrow, what’s in the area?”

“Four hundred and sixty-two people,” Sparrow said calmly.

“Moving?”

“Yes.”

“In the same direction?”

“No.”

“Put them up on tactical.”

They were clumped in two groups, relatively even in number, and they were moving toward each other. Typical Yakutsk: domes so interested in choking each other off that they missed all of their common ground. He would have left them to their futile devices, but Elena’s downed shuttle was right in between them.

He swore again, and tried comms. “This is Sparrow calling the shuttle off of Budapest.” Pick the fuck up.

“The other shuttle is not receiving comms,” Sparrow told him.

“Can they send?”

“No.”

“Are we close enough to break a comms jam?”

“No.”

“How long until we reach her?”

“One minute seventeen seconds.”

Eternity. Shit. “Are any of those people targeting the shuttle?”

“Insufficient information to determine target.”

“Is the shuttle in the line of fire?”

“Yes.”

“How likely are they to light up?”

“Direct impact at a range of less than two hundred meters will result in ninety-four percent likelihood of an incendiary event.”

Damn, damn, damn. What he wouldn’t give to just open up on both groups of colonists. He recognized it as frustration, but he found himself long over the impulse to rescue people who would shoot at those sent to help.

“What are they firing?” he asked the shuttle. It was remotely possible they were using something old, something that might be vulnerable to a generated EMP or even a radio jam.

“Plasma P7 rifles,” Sparrow said.

“How many?”

“Five hundred and forty units. Two hundred and twelve with the group south of the shuttle, the rest with the group north of the shuttle.”

More guns than people. Never a good equation. “Sparrow, keep an eye on Budapest’s shuttle. If any of those rifles locks on her, fire on the shooter. Understood?”

“Understood.”

If Sparrow shot a colonist, it would be an act of war. It might also come far too late to save Elena and Arin Goldjani.

But Greg would sleep better.

Behind him, all nine of his passengers were pulling on env suits. Herrod returned again, and said, “I can pilot, Captain.”

Greg met Herrod’s eyes through the clear fabric hood of his suit. Serious, military, entirely straightforward. He nodded, and stood. Herrod slipped into his seat.

“The comms jam is broken,” Sparrow said as they approached.

Greg tied into the colonists’ comms. “Drop your weapons!” he shouted. “This is Captain Greg Foster of the CCSS Galileo. That shuttle you’re targeting contains people in need of medical help. According to the Armed Conflict Act of 2976—”

One of the colonists pointed his P7 upward and took a shot at Sparrow.

They were high enough that the shot did nothing but scar the shuttle’s hull, but the message was clear. Before Greg could shout an order, Herrod was keying in a command, and Sparrow laid down a line of shots ten meters before each group of colonists. Greg saw them stop, saw some of them throw up their arms before their faces, saw a few turn and run. You guys are the brains of the outfit, he thought at the fleeing people. Herrod dropped Sparrow to the ground in front of the others.

“Stand the fuck down, all of you,” Greg shouted over the comm, “or we’ll shoot straight next time!”

They did not, he observed, drop their guns, but they stopped advancing and avoided pointing anything at his ship. He stood, grabbing one of the large shoulder cannons from the back of the ship, and slung it next to his ear. “Sparrow, keep us covered,” he told the shuttle, and opened the door.

The colonists watched him, wary, as his platoon filed out of the door, Greg among them. “Anybody fires,” he told them, “the ship will take you out.”

“That’s illegal,” someone called resentfully.

“Your next of kin is welcome to sue.” The platoon, weapons raised, gave him cover as he backed around Sparrow’s nose until he was completely sheltered by the shuttle’s hull.

He turned to the others. “Keep them back,” he said, then slung the cannon over his shoulder and ran toward the wreck of Budapest’s shuttle. “Elena?”

“I’m here,” she commed back. “We need to get Arin out of here.”

We need to get both of you out of here, you damn fool.

He covered the last ten meters to the shuttle’s open doorway, and squeezed in between the upended shipping containers.

And there was Elena, hanging on to a handle on the wall, hovering over a battered-looking civilian who had to be Arin Goldjani. Goldjani was young indeed: rangy, all knees and elbows, a patch of hair shadowing the brown skin of his jaw. The kid was conscious, and his color wasn’t bad, but his nose was clearly broken; through the hood of his suit Greg could see most of his face was covered in blood.

Elena herself … well, he had seen her look better. Her env suit was covered in dust and grime, and through the clear hood, he could see long strands of hair hanging in her eyes. He squinted and looked closer; he thought some of her hair was blue instead of her natural dark brown. If she was pleased or surprised to see him, she did not let on. Her expression, beyond concerned, was singularly irate.

“Can you get us out?” she asked him.

“Are you abandoning this bird?” he asked.

She looked as if she hadn’t considered the question, and he realized she must be very worried about the kid. “I think we have to for now,” she said. “Maybe we can come back for it later.”

“I don’t think so,” he told her. “I think as soon as we get out of here, they’re going to throw themselves at each other.”

“But we brought food.” This came from Goldjani, and he seemed genuinely confused. “More than enough. What do they need to fight for?”

“I don’t think need comes into it at this point,” Greg told him, but he kept his voice gentle. There were some truths about humanity that were never easy to learn, even when they were laid out before your eyes. “Let’s get you out of here, and take you somewhere that has a doctor.”

“It’ll have to be Galileo,” Elena told him.

She looked at him, saying nothing else, and he realized what she was telling him: the kid’s injuries were beyond the limits of simple first aid. Worse than he looks. Whatever she had seen on the shuttle’s small med scanner had spooked her. Budapest may have had a full-service med kit, but she thought Goldjani needed a surgeon. “You ever been on a Corps starship, Goldjani?” Greg asked him.

The kid smiled. “No, sir.”

“As long as you’re a civilian,” Greg corrected him, “I’m not ‘sir.’ You can call me Captain, or just Greg, if you like.”

“I’d like to see Galileo, Captain,” Goldjani said.

“Excellent. Then let’s get you out of here.” He turned to Elena. “We need some kind of a stretcher.”

“Come on, Elena,” Goldjani put in. “I can walk.”

She ignored him. “We’ll need to pull one of these containers apart,” she said. “We dumped all the usual supplies off this bird to make room for the seed.”

They poured the contents of one container into the sand outside the door. Greg took a quick look; the colonists were still milling around in front of Sparrow, murmuring to themselves, their hands still on their weapons, eyeing Greg’s infantry with increasing boldness. We are running out of time, he thought. Behind him, Elena had brought out a power saw and was running it rapidly through the corrugated material of the container. “I’ll need to reinforce it,” she told him, eyes on her work. “It’s too flexible.”

“Isn’t there anything I can do?” Goldjani asked plaintively.

Elena’s jaw set. “You can stay home next time,” she snapped, and the boy fell silent. Greg glanced at him; his expression had closed. Goldjani didn’t know her well enough to recognize fear.

Just then, Greg heard a hail of footsteps on the ship’s hull, and the whole structure shook. He turned to look out the door and saw people jumping to the ground, shooting toward the other set of colonists. His platoon was shouting, but the colonists were leaving them alone. Damn, now they really were in the middle of a firefight. “Move it, Elena,” he said.

She finished fastening three horizontal panels on the bottom of the sheeting. “Watch your fingers,” she warned Greg, lowering the makeshift stretcher to the ground next to Goldjani. “The edges are a little rough.”

Goldjani, subdued, didn’t resist when Greg and Elena slid him gently onto the stretcher. If they hurt him further, he didn’t let on. Stubborn kid. Greg remembered himself at nineteen, powered by nothing but hormones and self-righteous anger. He would have been equally stupid in Goldjani’s situation. “I have to warn you,” he said, hoping to cheer the kid up, “my doctor’s kind of a dick.”

“Then why do you keep him?” At least Goldjani was making an effort.

“Because he mixes really good drinks and lets me win at cards,” Greg told him. Goldjani smiled, and Greg thought it was partly genuine.

“Anything here you need to bring?” he asked Elena.

“No. Wait!” She dashed to the front of the shuttle and retrieved something off the floor: a box, about fifteen centimeters across. From the way she lifted it, it was either empty or contained something quite light. She tucked it into her pocket. “Bear’s going to have my damn head,” she said, giving a resigned glance around the shuttle. Then she looked back at him, businesslike, determined, familiar. “Let’s get out of here before somebody drops a nuke on those guys.”

She took Goldjani’s head, and Greg lifted the corrugated sheet at his feet. He commed Bristol and Darrow. “We’re coming out with wounded,” he said. “Cover us.”

They lifted, and he backed out of the shuttle, steadying himself in the dirt before Elena came out after him. The colonists were all in front of Sparrow now, ignoring Herrod’s repeated exhortations for a cease-fire, shooting determinedly at each other. Along with the shooting, there were a couple of fistfights. In the training vids, enemies were always expert and organized, with a strategy discernible after a few minutes of observation. In reality, colony squabbles were almost always made up of a bunch of homeowners engaged in a deadly slap-fight with their neighbors.

Before they could make it to the door, a plasma flare sped past Greg’s head, and he swore. “One more shot like that,” he shouted, “and we’ll blow it up, do you hear me? We’ve got wounded here! Stand the fuck down!”

Another shot went wide, and they started scrambling for the door. “When we get inside,” Greg told Darrow, “fire one shot directly back at Budapest’s shuttle, and withdraw.”

Goldjani protested. “You really want them to blow up the cargo?”

“Plasma cannon won’t breach the cargo containers,” Elena told him. “But it’ll destroy the shuttle and make a hell of a statement. They’ll leave us alone long enough for us to get out of here.”

Another shot caught the side of Sparrow, and Greg cursed. “Now, Darrow!” he shouted, hauling his end of the stretcher into the ship.

Darrow aimed the cannon and fired, and Greg realized they should have been farther away.

The shuttle blew instantly, the chemical flame lighting up the landscape. The shipping containers, as advertised, were jostled by the blast but undamaged. But the seed they had dumped into the dirt was vaporized, a cloud of dust sinking slowly in the low gravity. Greg knew the colonists could see it, too.

The platoon hustled inside, the door closing behind them. Greg and Elena set Goldjani’s stretcher down, and he left her to seal the door while he went to the pilot’s seat to get them out of there. Herrod was already standing, giving up his place.

The grain distraction had worked, at least in part. Some of the colonists had rushed over to the cargo containers, tugging at them, desperately trying to pull them aside. Desperately. There was a lot of seed, but their actions suggested they needed every bit of it, including what had been destroyed. “Is there more?” Greg asked Elena.

“On Nova Ganymede,” she said. “Six weeks away.”

Of course. “Get him secure,” Greg told his soldiers grimly. “We’re getting out of here.”

More colonists had surrounded the containers, ignoring Sparrow’s weapons. They were squabbling again, shoving at each other. Someone behind the row of colonists began to fire, and the people began to drop, one by one in a row, from both sides. “But—” Arin broke off. “Can’t you stop them?”

“We’ve got nothing to stop them with,” Greg said, as gently as he could. And he lifted them off, abandoning the chaos, pointing Sparrow’s nose at the pristine stars.

CHAPTER 7

Greg lifted them off slowly, most likely in deference to the people on the ground, but Elena didn’t think his consideration would be necessary much longer. She had seen far too many squabbles go this way. In a few minutes, Yakutsk would be down five-hundred-odd colonists, and the dome governments would be back to accusations and raids. Or worse.

And she wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to help.

She sat on the floor next to Arin, gripping the bench as the shuttle rose through Yakutsk’s light gravity and began generating its own field, stabilizing them. Shit. She was going to have to comm Bear.

“Greg,” she said, “can I have comms control?”

Across from her, Admiral Herrod sat in silence. She wanted to tell him to say something; his silence was unnerving. But he had helped, she realized. He had kept the shooters off them long enough for them to get Arin to safety. He had done something good.

Even a stopped clock is right once a day.

“Go ahead,” Greg said from the pilot’s cabin.

Bear picked up almost immediately. “Shaw? What the fuck? Have you got Arin?”

“He’s here,” she said. “He’s safe. We’re headed back to Galileo.”

“Fuck Galileo,” Bear snapped. “You need to get your ass back here. Did you drop those supplies?”

“He’s injured, Bear.”

Bear went silent for a moment. “How bad?”

Even with her isolated existence, Elena knew the tone: the stomach-knotting fear of a parent too far from a sick child. “He’s talking,” Greg interceded. “He was steady as a rock out there.”

“I’m fine,” Arin said, trying to sound reassuring.

But Bear didn’t want their reassurances. “Elena?”

“He’s got a concussion,” she said, “and I think a ruptured spleen. But the internal bleeding is under control. We’ll be back on Galileo in—” She turned to meet Greg’s eyes.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “I’ll have a med crew waiting. We’ll look after him, Savosky.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Bear said, and terminated the comm.

Elena cursed, and Arin spoke up. “Listen, Lanie, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to him. It’ll be fine.”

“Sit still,” she said shortly, and Arin fell silent again, his expression closing. Dammit, she’d hurt his feelings again. He did not understand.

How could he? He’s just a kid.

Who you nearly got killed.

She looked up. Herrod was watching her, his black eyes unreadable. She hadn’t seen his face in a year and a half, and he looked older than she remembered. Much older. She did the math in her head: he’d be seventy-nine now. She supposed some years were harsher than others.

Not that he didn’t deserve it.

She glanced behind her to where Bristol and Darrow were sitting with the others. Bristol blanched, his pale skin communicating his feelings without words, and she nearly smiled. She’d always intimidated him. She wasn’t entirely sure why. He was older than she was, and much bigger; but she had to admit he’d annoyed her fairly often, and she’d let him know it. Some people seemed to find her annoyance frightening. When she had been in the Corps, that had been useful.

Rebecca Darrow gave her a friendly nod. “Good to see you, Chief,” she said.

I’m not Chief anymore, Elena thought; but she didn’t correct her. “You too, Becky,” she said. Darrow hadn’t changed: tall, sturdily built, straight jet-black hair, smooth, gold-tan skin without anything resembling a line or blemish. She would look the same at sixty as she did now. After eighteen months away, Elena found the effect unnerving: it would be so easy to tell herself it had all been an illusion, from the transfer to her resignation to this awful day.

Just like Becky Darrow, Greg had not changed. He had stormed in—unasked, as usual—and she had fallen into step with him as if they had never been apart. That had been, she had realized since she left the Corps, one of the foundations of their friendship: they strategized the same way. In the field, in a crisis, their communication was fluid and efficient: no arguments, no power struggles, just solutions. She had always liked working with him, because he made sense. She had been startled as hell the first time she’d learned not everyone felt the same.

She tugged off her hood and smoothed the damp strands of hair out of her eyes. “Can you guys watch him?” she asked Bristol and Darrow. When they nodded, she climbed to her feet and headed for the front of the cabin. This was not the place for their long-overdue conversation, but that wasn’t the only conversation they needed to have.

She slid into the copilot’s seat and looked over at Greg. She wasn’t sure why she had expected him to look different; a year was not so much time. He was still tall, still slim, still square-jawed and flawlessly handsome, still striking with his bright gray and black eyes against his dark skin. Even his hair was the same, cropped so close he was nearly bald. She had asked him, once, why he kept it so short, and he’d said, “Because I like how it feels when I have to slap my head in frustration.” Then he had laughed, and she had never been sure his answer was serious.

She could tell he knew she was looking at him. Years ago, before things had become strange between them, he would have asked her what was wrong. Maybe he doesn’t care anymore, she thought, and was hit by a wave of unexpected loneliness. She had to take a moment to swallow it away.

“Thank you,” she said, “for coming after us.”

“Dumbass place for a cargo shuttle,” he remarked.

“We don’t make the drop, we don’t get paid.”

“In a case like this, maybe it’s a fair trade.” He paused. “Are you guys going to get stiffed on this one?”

“Bear said the import officer told him as long as the cargo was close enough to the cultivation dome for them to retrieve it, he’d sign off.” She sighed. “I don’t know if we’re going to get stiffed. Our accountant will fight that fight. If we don’t get the money, she’ll have to figure out another way to make up the shortfall.”

“So your accountant is a magician.”

Elena thought of Naina, scrupulously honest, dissecting every financial loophole available for the company that employed her. “Yeah, she kind of is. Listen, Greg.” That got his attention. “I want to ask a favor.”

She half expected him to summarily eject her from the shuttle for her nerve, but he just said, “Okay.”

“Do you remember Jamyung, the trader we used to buy parts from?”

He did, and she told him the story, from the comm she had received earlier that day, to arriving in Smolensk to find Jamyung murdered, to Dallas’s story of the strangers who killed him. “But that’s not the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is this … thing he left for me. This artifact. I thought he was bullshitting when he said it talked to him, but it talked to me, too.”

At that he frowned, that familiar formidable scowl, and she knew then he was focused on the problem. “Show me.”

She took the box out of her pocket, and he raised his eyebrows at her. “I should probably have tossed it,” she admitted. “But … there’s something about it. I can’t really explain.”

He took it from her and opened the box. As he stared at the artifact, his expression eased into curiosity. She wondered if, as she did, he found it beautiful. “His scout found this on the surface? What was it a part of?”

“No idea.” He reached out a finger, and she held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t do that. That’s when it talked to me, when I touched it.”

His eyes locked with hers. “What did it say?”

“That’s …” She struggled to explain the message. “It was nonsense, really. Overlapping voices, noises, rhythm. And then, emerging from the static, one word. Galileo. Over and over again.”

She hadn’t wanted to tell him, but somehow he had seen it in her face. “It affected you,” he realized, and she nodded.

“It left me feeling … lonely, I guess. And really disoriented. I almost crashed us without the help of those attackers. Greg, if it’s some kind of a weapon …”

“Not much of a weapon if you have to touch it first.”

“Maybe it’s a prototype.”

“That will evolve into a non-contact weapon?” He kept frowning at the artifact, but when he reached out to close the box, she thought he was reluctant. “What’s the favor?”

“I don’t have anything on Budapest sophisticated enough to scan something like that,” she told him. “I was wondering if Ted could look at it. Galileo’s deep scanners would give us soup to nuts on what it’s really doing.”

He nodded. “Of course. I’ll pass it on.” He looked back at her. “You said this came in over your comm? Can you give me a copy of the message?”

That should have been an easy question to answer. She should have sent him over a copy without hesitation. If it had been Greg alone … but she thought of Ted, and the open engineering floor, and all those soldiers, some of whom she didn’t even know, listening to her message. Galileo … Galileo … Galileo …

“Can you promise me,” she asked, “that nobody but you and Ted, and maybe Jessie, will listen to it?”

Anyone else would have demanded an explanation. Anyone else would have told her she was being unreasonable, it was not important, it was just a random impersonal comm. Anyone else would have made her feel foolish for her reticence; after all, this thing was potentially a weapon, and they needed to understand it, no matter how private the message.

But all Greg said was, “You have my word.”

CHAPTER 8
Galileo

Jessica hissed through her teeth when she saw Sparrow enter the landing bay. The little shuttle had taken hits—a few bad ones, too—which meant Greg had been hot-rodding again. He had no business doing that. He should have brought more infantry with him, and a larger arsenal. He should have taken something with armor. He shouldn’t have risked himself in the first place for fifteen thousand tonnes of grain and a freighter shuttle.

Which wasn’t really what he’d done—she knew exactly why he had risked himself—but she was still angry with him.

Greg stuck his head out of the shuttle door and waved Bob’s people in. The medics stepped inside, and Greg climbed out, followed by Bristol, Darrow, and the others, and finally Admiral Herrod. Jessica stood at strict attention and saluted; Greg returned the gesture, but Herrod just gave her an amused look.

“What have we got, Commander?” Greg asked her. Formal. Whether that was for Herrod’s benefit or the infantry’s, she wasn’t sure.

“I’ve had both Oarig and Villipova pissing in my ear since you deployed troops at the wreck, sir,” she told him. It had mostly been Oarig, but she felt obligated to give the two recalcitrant politicians equal responsibility. “They’re accusing each other of destroying the cargo, and they’re both threatening to send troops to the cultivation dome.”

Her captain rubbed his eyes. “The cargo’s not destroyed,” he told her. “How many troops are we talking about, Jess?”

He knew the intelligence as well as she did. “Between standing militias and official security people? About twenty-three hundred in Smolensk, and another fifteen hundred in Baikul.”

“Drop each of those numbers by two hundred fifty,” he told her. “Damn. We don’t have enough people to shut them down by force, unless we’re willing to strike from up here, which would pretty much kill any shot at diplomacy. How far off is Meridia?”

“Eighteen hours.”

“Captain Foster,” Herrod interrupted, “let me jump on this. If they’re mostly still in the threat stage, we may be able to string together some kind of a cease-fire if we agree to help them retrieve the cargo.”

It was not, Jessica thought, an awful idea. Before he’d come aboard Galileo, she’d never have considered Herrod a diplomat, although she recognized that was mostly because he’d never had to be tactful with her. Recently, though, she had decided the role suited him: he read people extremely well, and he seemed to know instinctively when to behave with sympathy, whatever he might really be thinking.

Greg, it seemed, thought the same; he nodded. “Very well. I’ll be in the infirmary with Goldjani. Let me know what you hear from them. And, Admiral—thank you for your help down there.”

That had cost Greg something, but Herrod just arched an eyebrow at him. “I could hardly sit back and do nothing, now could I?” He nodded at Jessica. “Commander Lockwood.” And he left the landing bay.

Jessica gave Greg an inquiring look, and he shrugged. “He held off the attackers,” he told her. “From inside Sparrow, but still. Freed us up to do what needed doing. He was a genuine help.”

Despite her approval of Herrod’s diplomatic abilities, she still knew too much about him to trust his motives. She couldn’t keep the acid out of her voice when she responded. “Could you maybe go on a flight once in your life without getting shot at?”

“They weren’t shooting at us, really,” he told her. “It’s pretty much devolved down there. Budapest was set up from the start.”

Not my point, she thought, but she knew him well enough to let it go. “How’s the kid?”

“Bad.”

Minutes later the med team emerged with a boy on an anti-grav stretcher. His brown skin had alarming undertones of gray, but his eyes, as they swept over the storage bay, were alert and shiny. He met Jessica’s eyes and blinked, then turned away self-consciously. Lucid, then, she thought. It wasn’t a guarantee of anything, but it was not a terrible sign.

After him, dressed in a civilian env suit and covered in dust and something that smelled far worse, came Elena.

Her expression was drawn and anxious, and her appearance was uncharacteristically unkempt. Strands of hair had escaped from a loose braid and were hanging over her face, covered in the same red dust; but through the grime Jessica could see streaks of bright blue interwoven with her natural dark locks. A genetic graft, too; the color went down to the roots, and would grow like that until she changed it. It was a pretty color, Jessica thought, but the fact of it bothered her. Artificial hair color was a nod to civilian conformity. For Elena, it seemed like defeat.

“Is it that bad?”

Jessica realized she had been staring. She met her friend’s eyes, and suddenly none of it mattered, and she flung her arms around Elena, standing on her toes so she could give her tall friend a proper hug. Elena hugged her back. “You look just the same, Jessie,” she said.

Jessica pulled away, aware she was now covered in the same muck Elena was. “You stink,” she said. “And no, the color’s not bad at all. Why blue?”

“It cheers me up,” Elena said. Her smile was wan, and Jessica realized she was worried.

“You want to follow your friend to the infirmary?”

“And get away from the landing bay. Bear will be here any minute, and I can’t take him yelling at me just yet.”

“It’s not your fault the kid decided to follow you.”

She felt Greg move to stand next to her, and Elena’s eyes shifted to meet the captain’s. “I think that’s a matter of opinion,” she said, and she sounded tired.

“He’s awake and alert,” Greg told her quietly. “That’s a good sign.”

Which meant, Jessica realized, that Greg was worried about the boy as well.

The three of them headed for the infirmary. Jessica walked between them, half an eye on Elena. This was the first time her friend had been on board Galileo in eighteen months. Jessica had imagined the reunion a dozen times, and it had never been like this: Elena filthy and dispirited, barely noticing the clean, bright halls of her former home. She wouldn’t be staying, either, Jessica realized; this would only be a visit.

Maybe being home doesn’t mean that much to her after all. Given how long Elena had been away, the idea stung more than Jessica thought it would.

Bob Hastings, Galileo’s chief of medicine, was waiting for them and had the med scanner out as the medics shifted the boy to one of the infirmary beds. The doctor frowned at the readout, then waved them away. “Ten minutes,” he told them. His blue eyes swept over Elena. “You. Stay close by. You don’t look so good, either.”

Elena looked as if she wanted to protest, but she hung back, her miserable eyes on Arin. The boy wouldn’t look at her.

“Come on,” Greg said, his voice gentle. “Bob will take care of him.”

Jessica tried to catch Bob’s eye as they left, but his expression was grim and focused. Jessica looked down at Arin and made herself smile reassuringly. “Lousy bedside manner,” she told him, “but he’ll look after you.”

Damned if the kid didn’t smile back.

Once they were outside, Jessica couldn’t wait any longer. “What happened?”

“He stowed away and hid,” Elena said simply. “And when we crashed, nothing in the shuttle was secured. All the cargo landed on him.”

“After they shot at you,” Jessica pointed out. “Elena—”

“Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.”

“Of course it’s not!” Jessica’s temper flared. “How the hell could it be? Nineteen years old is grown-up on every damn colony we’ve got. And he knew how to secure himself on that ship, stowaway or not. Bob will fix him,” she said, “and then you can yell at him for being a stupid ass.”

“Where’s my boy?”

Jessica started; they should have been warned when Bear Savosky arrived, but she supposed he was too well-known to the crew for anyone to think of him as a guest. Normally Bear was relaxed and smiling, his massive bulk comfortable rather than a threat. But now he radiated rage and fear, and all of his ire was directed at Elena.

Who inexplicably didn’t defend herself. “Bob’s looking after him,” Elena said. “He should be out soon.”

Bear took two steps toward the main infirmary, then turned and paced back toward the door. He stopped to tower over Elena. “How did he get down there without anyone knowing it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He must have slipped between the cargo containers.”

“You didn’t pick up the weight discrepancy?”

“I didn’t weigh them before I left. I was thinking about how to get them off the shuttle without getting shot down.”

“And you fucked that up, too, didn’t you?”

At that, Greg spoke up. “Savosky—” he began, but Bear turned on him instead.

“She is not yours to defend anymore, Foster, so stay the fuck out of this.” Greg didn’t react, and Jessica realized with some surprise that he was deferring to Elena’s current commanding officer. Not the time, Greg, she tried to tell him with a glare, but he wouldn’t look at her.

Savosky turned back to Elena. “I warned you about that boy. I told you he idolized you, and that he’d follow you anywhere. And now he’s in there with some old quack, and you’re looking at me like he’s already dead and you’re trying to figure out how to weasel out of all of this.”

At last Elena got angry. “That’s not fair!” she shouted. “I never wanted him to do this! I told him he needed to be sensible, to learn good judgment, to—”

“To do whatever was necessary to get into the Corps?” Bear shouted. “How the fuck could he understand what that really means? Arin sees you, and Captain Perfect, and the pretty little redhead, and he thinks it’s like the vids he’s watched since he was a kid. He’s nineteen, and he thinks he’s going to live fucking forever, and you stand there telling me about judgment? You remember why the Corps doesn’t take anyone under twenty-two, don’t you?”

For Jessica, that was enough. “Bear.” She said his name quietly.

He turned to her, glowering, radiating fury. “What?”

“Stop yelling in the infirmary,” she said simply.

He glared, and loomed, and waited for her to say something else, and she just looked at him.

And then, silent, he turned and stomped out of the room.

Jessica looked back at Greg, and this time he met her eyes. Play nice, she thought at him, and by the exasperated look he gave her, she thought he understood. Then she turned and went after Bear.

He had moved partway down the hallway, as if he were removing the temptation to barge back into the infirmary, and was pacing back and forth. Galileo’s hallways were wide and tall, but Savosky made every ordinary space seem smaller. He looked up as she approached, and frowned. “Don’t start on me, Lockwood,” he said. “You know I’m right. She shouldn’t have been encouraging him.”

“You think that’s what’s behind this?”

“Of course it is!” He looked away and began pacing again. “Ever since we left Earth she’s been talking up the goddamned Corps, telling that kid how good he’d be, all the travel he could do, all the fucking adventures. Is this a fucking adventure, Lockwood? Getting shot down and watching a bunch of colonists kill each other? That boy’s nineteen, and she could have ended his life today! She—”

“That’s enough!” Jessica had never been patient with denial. “You’re blaming Elena for all of this? You brought her along because she was Corps! You threw her at this conflict—when you knew they might be attacking—because of her background, because she is what she is! You stand there shouting because she’s exactly what you knew her to be, what you’re using her for, and you’re blaming her for your own fuckups!”

“I did not make that kid think he could be a hero!”

“What difference does that make?” She knew he knew it, but he was too frightened to admit it yet. “He’s your responsibility, Bear. Your crew. It was on you to make sure he was where you assigned him. You knew he wanted to follow her down—you should have made sure he didn’t!” He turned away, but she wasn’t finished. “And by the way, maybe you should have been making that kid think he could be a hero. You think he follows her around because she’s got a nice ass? He follows her around because she’s telling him he can be more than what he is, than what everybody’s told him he could be his whole life! You’re his family, Bear. You should be telling him all that, and if you’re not? It’s your own damn fault if he doesn’t do what you tell him to do!”

“He is a child!”

“Not anymore, he’s not,” she said, more calmly. “He’s not grown yet, but he’s not a child. And you can’t treat him like one just because you’re afraid for him.”

“And what the hell do you know about being afraid? You’ve got no children, have you, Lockwood?”

And at that, she truly lost her temper. “Are we playing who’s seen the most death, Savosky? Because I’m the oldest of eighteen children. And do you know how many of us are still around? Four. No, I’m not a parent. But don’t you dare tell me I don’t know how it feels to be helpless when someone you love is hurt, because I will put you off this ship myself!”

He looked enraged, and opened his mouth; and then he turned to the corridor wall and swore for a long time. When he finally stopped, his fists had fallen open, and he seemed less enormous.

“He was thirteen when we adopted him,” he told her. “So hesitant. It took Yuri three weeks to get him to tell us what he liked to eat. We found out after he’d been with us a year that he’d been hoarding the allowance we gave him because he wasn’t sure when we’d ask for it back, or when we’d want something from him that he couldn’t give us. He didn’t trust us. He didn’t trust that we loved him. He didn’t think anyone ever had. I promised—” He broke off, and took a breath. “I promised I would never let anything hurt him. And this, Lockwood. This. All I would have had to do was verify where he was before we left Budapest. It would have taken three seconds. It’s not like I didn’t have any warning that he’d do something like this.”

“You can’t stop him from having a life, Bear,” she told him. “And you can’t stop him from getting older, or doing dumbass things while he’s figuring out what kind of a person he wants to be.”

“It’s impossible,” he told her, “living like this. How do you love someone, and watch them take risks like that? How do you just stand aside while they throw themselves into the void?”

Oh, Bear. “You do it,” she said, “because the alternative is never loving anyone. And most of us, thank every god you can think of, cannot survive like that.”

He turned toward her. “You’ve lost a lot of family.”

“I have.”

“I’m an ass.”

“You bet.”

At that he broke into a surprised grin, then sobered. “I apologize, Lockwood. I’m not at my best right now.”

Instinctively she reached out, placing her hand over his massive forearm. “Don’t apologize, Bear,” she told him. “You’re terrified. You get dispensation for pretty much anything. And all I can tell you is Hastings is the best fucking doctor in the Corps, and Arin is conscious and lucid. Both of these are good things.”

“There are days I think having a kid was the worst idea I’ve ever had,” he admitted.

“My aunts always said the same thing,” she told him.

Another flash of a grin, and then his eyes fell closed, and she did her best to embrace his bulk, the dust and filth of Elena’s env suit between them.

CHAPTER 9

It’s not your fault, Elena.”

She had dropped into a chair after Bear left, exhausted and helpless, vaguely aware of the state of her appearance. She should find somewhere to wash up, clean off some of the stench, find something else to wear. There would be clothes in the gym she could borrow, maybe even something without a Corps logo on it. She should go after Bear and let him keep yelling at her; she knew him well enough to know he would need to yell until he wound down. Then she thought of Jessica with him, and decided he might wind down on his own. Bear was no match for her friend.

“You can’t know that,” she told Greg. He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen her with Arin for six weeks, so grateful to have found someone who saw her life in the Corps as something other than some violent, incomprehensible part of her history. She’d been flattered. She’d felt a little less lonely. And she’d come close to getting him killed.

But Greg just looked surprised. “Of course I can. Savosky’s the captain of that ship, civilian or no. It was his responsibility to make sure his people were at their posts going into this thing.” He was staring at her, his gray eyes clear, as if he believed it.

“Arin’s been following me around the whole time, Greg,” she confessed. “Wanting to hear about the Corps. Looking for stories of glory. I fed him all kinds of crap. I even started training with him, telling him he could get in if he wanted.”

“From what I saw today,” Greg told her, “he probably could. He kept a level head, which is saying something in that fucking mess.”

“But—” He was doing what she had been doing: thinking about it from the wrong direction. “He’s a civilian, Greg. There was no way I could make him understand the reality of it all. I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have shoved him away. The last thing I should have done is encourage him to see the Corps as an option.”

“Is that what Savosky told you?”

“I—don’t you think he’s right?”

Something flashed across his face: annoyance, she thought, or maybe anger. But when he spoke, his voice was soft. “I don’t think you really believe that, Elena,” he told her. “Savosky’s a civilian, too. He doesn’t understand.”

“He understands Arin better than I do.”

“Do you think so?” He was watching her, those incisive eyes studying her face. “Do you remember nineteen?”

She thought back. She had been in college, serious and single-minded, eyes on one thing and one thing only: doing well enough so she would be accepted at Central Military Academy, to fulfill the only dream she had ever had. She had been humorless, fatalistic, and invincible. “I was an idiot,” she confessed.

A smile rippled over his lips. “Me too. And if anybody had tried to tell me anything—never mind my dad—I’d have dug in my heels and done exactly the opposite. What happened on Govi, Elena?”

She rubbed her eyes. “That one was definitely my fault. We’d found this lifeboat, with seven people, and they were fucking freezing and scared as hell, and there were waves coming in. So I had Arin fly low, and I took a net cable, and I dove into the ocean to hook them so we could pick them up.”

He stared. “You dove into the ocean.”

“Yes.”

“The freezing, toxic one.”

“That’s the only one that was there, Greg,” she said irritably.

And then, to her surprise, he laughed, and sat back, and she thought she caught something resembling affection in his eyes. “No wonder Savosky’s been short with you. He must have thought you’d lost your mind.”

“I couldn’t leave them, Greg. I—”

“I know, Elena. And if he’d asked me before you guys hit Govi, I would have told him exactly what would happen.” He grew more serious and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Here’s what I think happened today: I think Savosky fucked up. I think this kid is better at subterfuge than anybody thought. And I think you would have had to lock him in a cargo hold to keep him away from that moon. He’s lucky he was with you. I’m guessing it took some flying to keep that bird from shattering on the way down.”

She hadn’t thought about it. She had flown the way she always did. “He shouldn’t have had to see what he saw today,” she said, clinging to her guilt.

And Greg’s gray eyes grew somber, and she saw grief, deep and familiar. She always forgot how much grief he carried with him, all the time. “Nobody should have to see what he saw today.”

“You know,” she said, careful and uncertain, “it wasn’t your fault, either. Yakutsk is Yakutsk. You got here as quickly as you could.”

“It’s never enough, though. Five hundred people. Do you think any of them walked away?”

“You cannot fix the universe, Greg,” she insisted. She had said it to him before, a thousand times. “You don’t have that power. Nobody does.”

He met her eyes, and for one instant everything was erased, and he was her old friend, the one who always knew what to say, who always knew her moods without asking, who made her feel stronger and more focused just by being there. His gaze lightened, and she thought, just maybe, for that one moment, he felt the same way in return.

And then a sound came over her comm: a digital hiccup, an audio artifact, like a message that had been overly compressed and resent too many times. She caught a few words, then a phrase, and then the message cleared up: “This is an automated distress call from Cytheria, off of the PSI starship Chryse. We are in need of retrieval. Repeating.” The message played over, this time in a common PSI dialect.

“Greg,” she said, “did you just—”

“I received it, too,” he told her. His hand was behind his ear. “Lieutenant Samaras, did you just pick up a distress call?”

“No, sir.” Samaras sounded curious. “We’re clear on comms.”

Greg met Elena’s eyes, then said, “Lieutenant, I need you to raise Chryse for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Elena took a moment to digest that. “Since when,” she asked him, “are you on chatting terms with Chryse?”

“I think that’s overstating it.” When she kept staring, he relented. “Since this morning. But I don’t know that they’ll answer me on an official comm line.”

But a moment later, Greg’s concerns were put to rest. “Captain Foster,” said a warm baritone voice. “What can I do for you?”

“Captain Bayandi,” Greg said, “I’m sorry to trouble you, but we’ve just received a distress call from Commander Ilyana’s shuttle.”

Bayandi. The most elusive PSI captain ever known to Central Gov. And friendly, no less. This was feeling more surreal by the moment.

“Let me check.” Bayandi’s voice had gone serious, but lost none of its warmth, and Elena tried and failed to reconcile his affect with everything she had been taught about the strange, standoffish PSI ship. After a moment, the PSI captain continued. “I am receiving only telemetry, Captain,” he said, palpably worried. “Cytheria has dropped out of the stream. Her environmental systems are intact, but I cannot raise Commander Ilyana. If her shuttle is damaged and she cannot reenter the field—she is not close to anything.”

“Can you get to her?” Greg asked.

There was a brief pause. “Our travel time would be nine hours and four minutes. I do not suppose, Captain Foster, that you have anyone closer?”

“I could go,” Elena put in.

Bayandi said, “May I ask who you are?”

Polite. Not hostile, not reactive; just polite, and faintly curious. “I’m—” How was she supposed to introduce herself? “I’m Elena Shaw,” she said. “I’m off the freighter Budapest.”

But Bayandi knew her name. “Ah, yes—you were chief of engineering on Galileo, weren’t you? It’s a pleasure to meet you. Can your freighter spare you?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, and ignored Greg’s raised eyebrows.

“Then I thank you, Elena Shaw,” Bayandi said, sounding relieved. “We are most grateful for your help. And if you could let me know what you find—if Commander Ilyana is all right—”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I find her,” Elena assured him.

“Please tell her—” He paused again, longer this time. “Please tell her that I hope she is well.”

The comm terminated, and she stood, ready to move. “If I head back to Budapest now,” she reasoned, “I can take the other shuttle before Bear has a chance to stop me.”

“Wait.” He got to his feet, and she stopped. “Elena, I can’t send you on a military rescue.”

“It’s not a military rescue,” she reasoned, “it’s a PSI rescue. And you’re not sending me anywhere. I don’t work for you anymore.”

At that his jaw set, and she was abruptly aware she might have phrased that more tactfully. But when he spoke, he kept his temper. “Okay, then, how about this? It’s irresponsible of you to head off into the unknown in a civilian shuttle. Ilyana’s got weapons. You don’t.”

There was something here she was missing. “Why are you worried about this, Greg?” she asked. “I mean, Chryse is Chryse, sure; but they’re PSI. They’ve never threatened us.”

He stared at her, and she recognized the look in his eyes: Too public. Not here. “We’re stuck here to deal with Yakutsk,” he said, instead of answering her question, “but I can spare you a shuttle. At least you won’t be defenseless.”

He led her out of the infirmary, and she waited him out.

“Captain Taras is worried about Chryse,” he told her as they walked toward the shuttle bay. “Apparently they’ve been acting odd since a comms outage that occurred four months ago.”

“Four months.” The significance of the time frame didn’t escape her. “Taras thinks they’ve been compromised.”

“She didn’t come right out and say that.”

“You think they’ve been compromised.”

“I think it’s not a possibility we can ignore.”

She shook her head. “Bayandi sounds … friendly.”

“He does.” Greg’s tone went dry. “Funny, isn’t it, that the first time we talk to the captain of such an isolated starship, he turns out to be so personable?”

“And the distress call, aimed just at you and me.” She was feeling increasingly uneasy. “I don’t suppose you could spare me a weapon.”

“According to regulations? No.” His lips set in a grim smile. “But under the circumstances, regulations can go fuck themselves.”

CHAPTER 10

The Corps is not here as your personal army, Governor,” Greg told Villipova, “or to teach your people self-defense. We’re here to keep you from blowing each other up.”

Greg was seated at his desk next to Herrod, the two governors on vid before them, and Greg found himself grudgingly grateful for the older man’s presence. Herrod’s habitual emotional detachment worked well in diplomatic situations like this one, when Greg was tempted to abort the entire process and tell everyone involved to grow the hell up. Herrod’s reticence reminded Greg that practical diplomacy was less about making people shake hands than it was about holding people off of each other until frayed tempers managed to settle.

His own frayed temper included.

Villipova frowned. “It’s not possible for you to do that without taking sides,” she insisted. “Oarig’s people shot down that civilian transport. It’s his fault the food both of our cities need lies frozen on the surface.”

“We weren’t shooting down anything!” Oarig interrupted. “They were out there confronting your people, who were going to hoard it all for themselves! They—”

“That’s enough,” Greg snapped. God, this finger-pointing is tedious. “Gov sent us here to keep the two of you from doing this kind of shit to each other,” he told them. “And that means it stops now. You want to hash out who did what to whom—do it afterward, when your people have supplies and safe places to live again. On the other hand”—he felt Herrod’s eyes on him—“if you’re genuinely inclined to shoot down the people trying to help you, we are going to take sides, and it’s not going to be with either one of you. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”

Oarig’s lips narrowed. Villipova just looked tired.

“So here’s what’s going to happen,” Greg told them. “You are going to clear all of your people off the surface. Once the crash site is clear, I’ll send down some infantry to help retrieve the remains of the cargo. They—not your people, on either side—will move the cargo into the cultivation dome. They will dispense supplies in precisely the same amounts to each dome.”

“Captain,” Oarig objected, “Baikul has far more people. We need—”

“You need,” Greg told him, “to make sure your people stand down. Because the second we get wind of either side doing so much as target practice, all humanitarian help will be suspended. We’ll drop the seed where it belongs, and we’ll be out of there. Understood?”

Oarig looked as if he might object again, but this time a look from Herrod took care of him. He nodded, and Villipova said, “Understood.”

When the comm ended, Herrod raised his eyebrows at Greg. “You think that’s going to work?” he asked.

“Why not? Being reasonable hasn’t brought them anything. They call us, looking for help, we get here and they ignore everything we say. I sincerely doubt Gov wants us to spend weeks here letting them jerk us around.”

“Not what I meant, Captain,” Herrod said easily. Everything was always easy with him these days, a marked contrast to the short-tempered officer Greg had served under for years. It set Greg’s teeth on edge. “I have no quarrel with your strategy. Only your optimism.”

He rubbed his eyes. He had not anticipated this day would go well, but it had gone so much worse than he had feared. “Commander Lockwood is pulling the infantry together,” he said. “We should be able to protect the cargo, if nothing else.”

“What about the civilians?”

“As soon as they start shooting,” Greg told him, “they’re not civilians anymore.”

Herrod’s eyebrows went up again, but he didn’t argue.

Greg waited until Herrod had left before comming Jessica. “What’s the state of the infantry, Commander?” he asked.

“Ready as always, sir,” she said.

He could hear it in her voice: she was still annoyed with him for sending Elena after the PSI shuttle. When he’d told her he couldn’t spare the infantry, she’d pointed out that fully half of Galileo’s 226-member crew were not infantry. “You could have sent a mechanic, or a pilot. You could have sent me.”

“You’re not combat-trained.”

She had sworn at him, and he had known better than to laugh. “I am combat-trained to the same degree that Elena is. Just like everyone else on this ship. And most of us know our way around piloting a shuttle, especially one of our own. How the hell is what you’re doing any different than Savosky using her for risky missions his own people can’t hack?”

It wasn’t the same thing at all. But he couldn’t figure out how to explain it to her, so he’d just ordered her to drop it. A temporary respite at best, and in the meantime, he could expect her to be short with him.

If he’d had the luxury, he’d have sent Elena after Cytheria in one of the big armored troop carriers. Instead, he’d given her Nightingale, a ship she knew, and small enough for him to give up without jeopardizing their Yakutsk mission. Herrod’s sleek new travel shuttle might have done well enough, but apart from its lacking Nightingale’s armaments, Greg would have had to explain why he wanted to borrow it. And Greg wanted, as long as possible, to hide their strange relationship with Chryse from a retired admiral who was probably still part of Shadow Ops.

Elena had balked, briefly, at the heavy plasma rifle he wanted to give her. “I’ll be on my own, after all,” she pointed out. “A hand weapon would be more than enough.”

“I wouldn’t send anyone into this mess with nothing but a hand weapon,” he replied. She’d given him a deeply skeptical look that was achingly familiar, and then lifted the gun effortlessly from his hands and slung it over her shoulder. She was still in her Budapest env suit, gray and utilitarian, still coated in dust and grime; but as she strode away from him toward Sparrow she looked as military as any other member of his crew.

She looked like she belonged.

Walking back to his office after seeing her off, he found himself unsettled and irritable, and it had taken him all those minutes to figure out what the problem was: from the moment he had seen her down on that moon, covered in compost, determined and furious and terrified for her crewmate, some knot he hadn’t realized was inside of him had relaxed, and he had felt more clearheaded than he had in a year. Which was unfair: she had chosen to leave Galileo, and she had chosen to resign her commission, guaranteeing he had no way of getting her back on board. He had understood her reasons and had even found them logical; but she had lied to him, back when they had first found out she was being transferred. They cannot separate us unless we let them, she had told him.

And then she had let them.

He did not have the luxury of getting mired in all of that right now. She would rescue Ilyana, she would leave with Budapest, and Yakutsk would find some kind of irritable peace. And he would figure out, once and for all, how to leave her behind.

“I want the infantry twelve-on, twelve-off,” he told Jessica. “No long shifts for anyone. We may need to call them all up together if the situation heats up before Meridia gets here.”

At that, her tone thawed a little, and she betrayed some of her worry. “Do you think it’s that bad?”

“I think when it goes it’ll go quickly.” He paused. “Jess—did you ever meet Commander Ilyana?”

“I don’t think so.” Jessica sounded thoughtful. “I’m sure I talked to someone on Chryse once or twice, but it would’ve just been a few words. Whether it was her or not I couldn’t say. Why?” He could almost hear her mind working. “Do you think they’d send us a ringer?”

That hadn’t been what was worrying him, but it was a good question. “I want everything we have on Ilyana,” he said. “As many images and reports as we can get. News, rumor, all of it.”

“You should ask Herrod.” The tone was back, but at least it wasn’t aimed at Greg anymore.

“You think he’d tell me?” He heard her scoff, and he thought he might be forgiven. “And when she gets here, Jess … I want her comms monitored, and I want a guard on her. Not a goon, but someone with sharp eyes. Taras can take her when Meridia gets here, but I don’t want Galileo at risk.”

“You’re thinking maybe rescuing her isn’t the best idea?”

“I’m thinking,” he told her, “that being kind doesn’t mean we have to be stupid.”

CHAPTER 11

How’s the kid?” Ted asked Jessica.

Jessica was seated in Ted’s office, her feet on his desk, going over the history of Commander Tatiana Ilyana. The easiest thing, as it turned out, had been to find her original name: Leslie Barrett Millar, born on Achinsk, reported as a runaway at seventeen after a history of run-ins with the police at government protests. What was more interesting than her early history, though, was the reason it was easy to find: the Admiralty had commissioned a similar search on Ilyana nearly twenty years ago. Greg, as it turned out, had been right to be concerned: the Admiralty, although lacking concrete proof, believed she was a fairly accomplished spy.

Of course, with PSI having been allied with Central almost without interruption for hundreds of years, she wasn’t sure why the Admiralty would be worried about a spy. She had been thinking, lately—as rumors swirled about colonies in the Fifth Sector wanting to shift the seat of Central Gov to their territory, leaving Earth in political limbo—that Central had wasted a lot of time over the decades worrying about PSI. PSI was often secretive, and certainly standoffish to a degree that Gov seemed to find puzzling. But in every instance that had mattered, Jessica had seen PSI step up and fight on the same side as Gov, the Corps, and the colonies.

Besides, she thought, thinking of Admiral Herrod, Central has plenty of accomplished spies of their own.

She looked up at Ted, who was leaning against one of the office’s windowed walls, his back to the open engine room outside. Ted never sat at his desk. Ever since he had been appointed chief of engineering, he had used the office, but never sat in the chair. He hadn’t said so, but she knew in his mind it was Elena’s. Of course, it might also have been Ted’s endless kinetic energy—he was not big on sitting at the best of times—but given how his teeth set every time someone called him Chief, she didn’t think that was the main reason.

“Stabilized, Bob says,” she replied. “If he were one of us, Bob would already have cut him loose. As it is, he wants to sit on him until Budapest has to leave.”

“So he’s worried.”

“I think cautious is probably more accurate.” Or, she thought, possibly territorial. For a cynical old man, Bob became deeply possessive of his patients, especially those who had been badly hurt. “If he was worried, he’d tell Bear to delay their next drop and stick around. I’m not so sure Bear won’t do it anyway.”

Ted was watching her curiously. “This kind of worrying familiar to you, Jessie?”

She met his eyes as neutrally as she could. “More than I’d like it to be,” she admitted. Ted knew her too well. “Ted, you’ve been around a bit.”

“You’ve been listening to gossip again, haven’t you?”

She ignored him. “Did you ever run into this Commander Ilyana?”

He shook his head. “Never dealt with Chryse directly,” he said. “But one of the guys I originally deployed with—he’s out on Borissova now—did an airlift with Chryse’s help. Said they were unbelievably well organized, but otherwise kind of rude.”

“Not surprising, PSI being PSI.”

“That’s why I remember him remarking on it. They must have been really unpleasant.”

Which was not unusual in isolation. But Jessica thought of Greg, and his reaction to Captain Bayandi. Greg was both curious and mistrustful of the man, and she did not think he would be so concerned if Bayandi had behaved with PSI’s typical coolness.

She shoved aside her research, giving Galileo a chance to digest more records. “Did you get anything on that artifact yet?” she asked.

For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to let her change the subject. But then he pushed himself off the wall and began to pace in front of her. “So what we’ve got there,” Ted told Jessica, “is an enigma.”

“Haven’t you scanned it?”

“Oh yes. I scanned it from every possible angle with everything we’ve got.” He shook his head. “It’s shielded. No matter what I point at it, I get a happy little NO DATA back from the system. So whatever it is, it’s got better tech than we have, which does not please me.”

It did not please Jessica, either. Better tech almost certainly meant Ellis.

“But the other side of it,” he added, “is that it didn’t actually do anything.”

Jessica raised her eyebrows. “What about Lanie’s message?”

“It’s not a message.” He leaned across her and hit a panel on the desk. A waveform appeared in the air, and he reached his fingers into the image and pulled it apart. “It’s an audio amalgam of comms she’s received and sent. There’s nothing original in there at all.”

Jessica got to her feet, walking around the waveform to stand at Ted’s side. “So it tapped into her comm and composed something from what it found.” She looked up at him. “Is it just me, or is that the opposite of not doing anything?”

“Well, okay, it’s not nothing,” he allowed. “But it’s not sophisticated, Jess. It’s basically an audio compositor that uses emphasis based on frequency. It’s a parlor trick. It’s the shielding that’s more interesting, and it’s possible even that’s just a variant of the loopback virus we hit a while back.”

She frowned. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew who was after it. Or how to use it.”

“I’ve got one more test I want to try,” he told her, “but I’ve been waiting for you, just in case I pass out or something.”

“You’re going to touch it.”

“Only way, Jess.”

“If it goes after you like it did Lanie—”

“I swapped my comm out right before you got here,” he said. “If it’s doing what I think it’s doing, it’s going to give me nothing but our conversation. And of course some lovely words from you about how wonderful I am.” He grew more serious. “You with me on this?”

She sighed and dropped her feet off the desk to stand. “I suppose I might as well watch the thing melt your brain.”

At that, he shot her a grin. “I live to serve.”

He led her to a small workroom. When he closed them into the space, she raised her eyebrows at him. He shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s a paranoia thing,” he told her. “It commed Lanie when she touched it, but if it’s got an interface that gets activated on contact, I don’t want to give it access to Galileo. This room is comms-locked.”

She looked around the small space. “What, always?”

“Sometimes we need a space where things can go wrong without broadcasting to the whole ship.”

The box containing the artifact was sitting on a table, next to a haphazard stack of spanners. “Is it safe to open?” she asked.

“The one thing I know,” he told her, “is that if there’s anything radioactive in there, it’s contained by whatever shielding it’s got.” He gave her a look. “You want to wait outside?”

She shook her head, and he opened the box.

The artifact was, she thought, about as anticlimactic as it could be. It was a flattened cube with rounded edges and corners, done in a gray polymer. If it had been sitting in a corner of the ship, she wouldn’t even have noticed it. Easy to camouflage, she thought. Easy to make someone pick it up without thinking.

Ted took a breath, extended a finger, and touched the cube.

After a moment he lifted his hand and touched it again, then laid his palm on the surface. He took it out of the box and held it with both hands, threaded it between his fingers, tossed it into the air and caught it again. He looked across at Jessica. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“I mean,” he said patiently, “I’m not getting anything, comms or otherwise, and monitoring is showing no signal.” He placed it back into the box. “If I hadn’t looked at Lanie’s comm myself, I’d have guessed she just hit some kind of random interference.”

Jessica frowned down at the artifact, suddenly ominous in its nondescriptness. “Is it possible that’s what happened?”

“Sure. But if it’s not this thing that scrambled her comm, there’s something roaming out in the wild doing it. Besides, she said Jamyung heard it, too, remember?”

She looked over at him. Something had occurred to her, but she didn’t want to share it yet. “Maybe it’s the comm,” she said. “Something Lanie’s and Jamyung’s had in common.”

“Maybe it doesn’t like the new ones,” Ted mused. “I could put my old one on and try it again.”

She shook her head. Regardless of the persistent inertness of the thing, risking Ted felt like an extreme response. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said. “There’s more we can find out without getting reckless. How thick is that inert polymer?”

“About half a centimeter.” He caught on to her thoughts. “You want to shave it, see if we get something stronger?”

She nodded. “Slowly. We see anything, any kind of a spike, and we stop right away.”

Ted pulled on safety gloves and removed the artifact again, clamping it securely against the tabletop. He could have used a hand spanner, but instead he mounted a mechanical one, setting it over one of the artifact’s narrow sides. “This will dig a micron at a time,” he told her. “As soon as it hits a variation in any reading at all, it’ll stop.”

And it was this exercise that gained them a result. The mechanical spanner stopped at 350 microns. “Anomaly detected,” it said, and projected what it had found. Jessica recognized it instantly.

Dim, incomplete, and fading: it was the magnetic shadow of a comm signal.

This was Jessica’s field. “I need an amplifier,” she told Ted, “and something that’ll extrapolate for me.”

“Extrapolation is awfully inexact.”

“Less inexact than just hacking it in half,” she pointed out, and he left to find the tools.

She spent the better part of an hour on the shadow, focusing on the smallest fragments she could find, telling Galileo what she did and did not want the ship to consider important. Galileo might have made entirely different choices, if Jessica had left it to the automated systems. None of this was precise, and it irked her cryptographic mind to be analyzing a potential weapon with what were basically guesses.

In the end, what she had was a muddled mess, but if she listened to it in just the right way, she could believe it was fragments of someone speaking. “Or dogs barking,” she said aloud, disgusted with herself. “Or maybe bats. Shit, Ted, this is meaningless.”

“Probably,” he agreed. “But see what you get from the extrapolator.”

They had to give the tool parameters. Yes, they thought it was human speech. Yes, they thought it was a known language. Yes, they thought it was recent. Yes, they thought it was a comm signal. She sat back and listened to the iterations. The extrapolator was focusing on the rhythm of it, the rise and fall of the tone; they had said speech, and the extrapolator was finding words.

“This is a chicken-egg thing, Ted,” she protested. “Nothing we hear will—”

Cytheria, the extrapolator said.

So much for doubts. She turned to Ted. “Did you hear that?”

He nodded. “Let it iterate a few more times.”

But having heard it, she couldn’t unhear it. Cytheria. And then, a few iterations later, a second word emerged, further down the stream: Chryse.

“What the hell?” Ted said, frowning.

But Jessica hit her comm to look for Greg. “Captain?”

He answered immediately. “What’s the matter, Commander?”

“Nothing. Everything’s—well. We’ve maybe got something on this … thing of Elena’s, sir. Do you still have the comm of the distress call you received on Yakutsk?”

“Of course. Hang on.” There was a pause, and the message played over her comm: This is an automated distress call. This is Cytheria, off of the PSI starship Chryse. We are in need of retrieval. Repeating. We are in need of retrieval.

“Galileo,” Jessica asked, “what are the odds that’s the message we’re trying to reconstitute?”

“Rhythmic and tonal match eighty-five percent certainty,” the ship said.

“Greg,” she said into her comm, “you should probably come down here.”

CHAPTER 12
Cytheria

Elena left Galileo wrapped in the familiarity of a shuttle she had flown a hundred times. The hum of the engine, the responsiveness of the controls, the curve of the front window with the tactical display overlaying her view of the stars—it was at once soothing and heartbreaking. Nightingale didn’t sound like Galileo, but Elena knew the shuttle’s music nearly as well, and she wanted nothing more than to stay where she was, eyes closed, and listening to the engines, possibly for the rest of her life.

Galileo’s melodies had not changed. Elena hadn’t even noticed until she realized what she was missing: that low-level awareness of an unfamiliar rhythm. During the six-week run from Earth, she had not had time to internalize Budapest’s sounds. Yuri was always patient with her questions—as an experienced mechanic himself, he knew how important it was to be tuned in to the ship—but she had always felt vaguely out of sync. She had stepped onto Galileo, and something inside of her had stilled, as if she had stopped worrying a wound.

And for that, if nothing else, she was grateful to Arin. Worrying about him had allowed her to avoid the fact that she was just going to have to leave again.

She would have to speak with Jessica, too. During their conversations over the last year, Jessica had volunteered information on Greg, knowing Elena would never ask; but Elena had realized almost as soon as she had seen him that Jessica had left out some important things.

Elena knew Greg had been seeing Andriya Vassily, captain of the Third Sector starship CCSS Cassia, and that Jessica didn’t entirely approve, worried that Greg had fallen back into the patterns of his failed long-distance marriage. Of course, he also had other lovers, including a journalist for the streamers whom Jessica openly disliked. Elena had seen the woman’s reporting, and she could understand why Greg might like her: she came across as quick and good-humored, and she was stunningly, vid-ready beautiful. Jessica had ranted, but Elena had found herself oddly pleased. After the marriage he had escaped, he deserved beautiful women. He deserved legions of them fighting over him. Sometimes, when she thought of him, she imagined just that.

But she had seen it in his eyes as he sat in the infirmary offering her absolution: he was lonely. He had always been lonely, as long as she had known him, but that was supposed to have changed. Over the last eighteen months, Elena had been jealous of his blossoming friendship with Jessica, the professional and personal relationship she was closed out of. She had been happy for them both, and bitterly sorry for herself. But apparently, despite their easy camaraderie, their relationship had changed nothing for Greg at all: he was still by himself in all the ways that mattered.

As long as she had known him, he had lived behind a wall. He would tell her, if she asked, that it was necessary, that he was the captain, that distance was critical. But she had seen it in him from the start, from the first time she met him, when she was an ensign looking for a transfer and he was the captain she wanted to impress. All these years she thought he had done it on purpose, kept himself away from everyone. She wondered, sitting in Galileo’s shuttle, if the truth was he had no idea how to let anybody in.

She had a moment of self-awareness at the thought, and nearly smiled. Always easier to psychoanalyze other people than to understand yourself, right?

“Nightingale, what’s our travel time?” she asked.

“Two hours, forty-seven minutes,” the shuttle responded.

“Wake me up in two hours and seventeen minutes,” she said. Unfastening her harness, she stood up from the pilot’s seat and wandered into the back of the little ship. She stripped off her filthy env suit and tucked it into a corner, then turned on the shuttle’s utilitarian sink and sponged off, dipping her head under the faucet to wash the dome dust out of her hair. When she finished she pulled on one of the regulation Corps env suits folded neatly in a storage drawer. She had no comb, but she ran her fingers through her long hair, working out the tangles, and weaved it into her usual loose braid.

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