REMNANTS OF TRUST
A CENTRAL CORPS NOVEL
Elizabeth Bonesteel

Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 2016

Copyright © Elizabeth Bonesteel 2016

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Author photo © Virginia Bonesteel

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: 9780008137830

Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008137847

Version: 2016-10-21

Dedication

For Alex

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

Chapter 19

Part II

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

Part III

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

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

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Bonesteel

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
T minus 8 years—Canberra

At least, thought Elena, I’ll die in a Corps uniform.

She faced down the gun, looking not into the barrel but into the eyes of the man holding it. Keita had brown eyes, but in the frigid, rainy afternoon of this dying planet they looked jet-black and devoid of light. He had always—for as long as she had known him—looked angry, but she thought she saw something else as he stared at her through the gun’s sight. Not fear, not that. Keita had never been afraid.

He looked lost.

The others were clustered behind him in the meager shelter of a crumbled cement wall. Savin was stoic as always, weight on one foot, but she saw his left hand resting on the grip of his pulse rifle. Jimmy had placed himself between Keita and Niree’s prone figure, the medic shielding his patient. Elena knew his expression without looking. The loud argument, in a shattered alley next to a public square, was risking their exposure. Jimmy would be annoyed with her.

“Get the fuck out of the way, Shaw!” Keita yelled.

She did not move. “Stand down, Ensign,” she said evenly.

“She killed the lieutenant! She set him up! You were there! You saw just like I did!”

Behind her, the girl she was protecting made a small sound, and Elena wanted to tell her to shut up. “She was a prisoner, Keita,” she said. The child had been in chains, used as bait. Keita had seen it, even if they had been too late to keep the lieutenant from being gunned down. “Lieutenant Treharne was trying to save her, and now you want to kill her?”

The gun’s barrel never wavered. “I will blow a hole through you, too, Shaw.”

At that, Jimmy couldn’t keep silent. “Keita—”

“Shut up, Jimmy.”

She and Keita said it in unison, and she almost laughed. But it was time to bring the confrontation to an end. “You’ll have to blow a hole through me, then, because I’m not fucking moving,” she said. “Make up your goddamned mind. We don’t have time for this shit.”

Seconds passed. Elena could hear the girl whimpering behind her, and fought off irritation. What good were tears? Tears wouldn’t make him put the gun down. Elena needed him to stop reacting and start thinking. She knew he could do it. She had seen him do it. She had served with him for six months aboard the CCSS Exeter, and despite his pretension of brainless thuggery, he was far more thoughtful than his usual manner betrayed.

“What about you, Savin?” Keita addressed the other infantry officer. “You with me, or are you going to listen to some fucking songbird?”

The nickname sounded ridiculous in context. But Savin, in his typically taciturn fashion, responded immediately:

“Songbird.”

Keita’s gaze faltered, and for a moment she caught a glimpse of pain in his eyes. Then he lowered his rifle, swore loudly, and stalked off.

The girl behind Elena began to sob openly. Elena ignored her, catching Savin’s eye. “Give him thirty seconds,” she instructed, “then get him back here.” Savin nodded and trotted after his friend. She turned to Jimmy, who had witnessed the entire exchange with growing incredulity. “Can you move her?” she asked.

Jimmy looked down at the fifth surviving member of their landing party. Lieutenant Niree Osai, ranking officer since Treharne’s death, was not unconscious, but she was in shock, blinking absently into the rain, her breathing shallow. Jimmy had used his jacket to wrap the remains of her arm, protecting the torn and ruined flesh from the acidic rainfall, but her color was awful, and she seemed to have no sense of where she was. Part of Elena envied her.

“She’s not stable,” he said. “She’s in shock, her pressure’s in the toilet, and she’s not nearly unconscious enough.”

“You misunderstand me.” She locked eyes with him. “I didn’t say should you move her, I said can you. Do you need help carrying her?”

“Lanie, she’s had her arm torn off. Moving her like this could kill her.”

She did not outrank him. She did not outrank any of them. She had no leg to stand on if she tried to give him an order. She wondered if Keita’s tactic with the rifle would work better for her. “Jimmy, if we’re not off this rock in seventeen and a half minutes, we lose our weather window, and we’re stuck here for thirty-seven hours. You fancy our chances for another thirty-seven hours?”

He knew as well as she did that they couldn’t survive it. Trained infantry or not, they were foreigners on this colony, and the natives who were hunting them knew every side street and abandoned building in the city. Starvation may have driven Canberra’s settlers mad, but it had not rendered them stupid. Keita and Savin had been able to retrieve Niree from them, but over two nights and a day, none of Elena’s team stood a chance.

Jimmy gave her a pleading look, but she did not shift. At last he sighed. “Yeah,” he told her, resigned. “I can carry her.”

“Get her ready, then. We’ll move when Keita gets back.” Jimmy knelt down by Niree, and Elena turned, at last, to the girl whose life she had saved.

She was fourteen, perhaps older. It was difficult to tell, sometimes, on planets where the children were chronically malnourished. She was short and thin and alabaster-pale, jet-black hair plastered to her cheeks by the soaking rain, and she had the sort of apple-cheeked prettiness that rarely bloomed into beauty with adulthood. She had stopped sobbing, but was still hiccupping, and her lips were blue. She stared at Elena with wide, frightened eyes.

“What’s your name?” Elena asked her.

A spark of hope rose in those eyes, and Elena could follow her thinking: perhaps I’ll be rescued after all. “Ruby.”

“Ruby.” Elena nodded. “If you slow us down, or give even the slightest indication that you are conspiring against us, I will shoot you myself. Understood?”

Those innocent eyes widened, and Elena saw tears filling them again. But Ruby nodded, and Elena turned away from her. “Can you fire and carry her at the same time?” she asked Jimmy.

“How many arms do you think I have?”

Just then Savin returned, and marching next to him was Keita, rifle still in his hands, the nose pointed at the ground. He would not meet her eyes, but Savin looked at her and gave her a nod.

“Okay.” She faced the others. “Two groups. Savin, you stay with Jimmy and Niree.” Savin was a dead shot; she wanted him protecting their wounded. “Keita, you’re with me and Ruby. We’re heading back to the ship. We leapfrog each other, providing covering fire.” She looked at them, one after another. “We’re more than a kilometer off, and we’ve got less than sixteen minutes to get there, so nobody stops. For anything. Clear?”

Three nods, including the child. Elena stared at Keita.

“Clear?” she repeated.

His eyes came up, dark and deadly, boring angrily into hers. “Clear.”

Jimmy and Savin went first, Jimmy slinging Niree awkwardly over one shoulder. He was a tall man, but slight—medics did not have to maintain the same fitness levels as the infantry, and with this planet’s Earth-point-two gravity, it was slowing him down. Of course, mechanics didn’t have to maintain infantry fitness levels, either, but she did it anyway, in part to prove to herself that she could, and in part to ensure nobody could accuse her of taking the easy way out.

If she had taken the easy way out, she might not have been a pilot as well as a mechanic. She might have missed this mission altogether. She might have been safe in Exeter’s engine room while her friends were running for their lives.

Better, or worse?

Shaking off the thought, she silently forgave Jimmy his high-gravity stumbles and beckoned to Keita, drawing her own weapon.

They proceeded through the ruined city a few hundred meters at a time, and Elena’s universe contracted into a short routine: watch, aim, wait … then run like hell to the next bit of shelter. The gravity fatigued her with alarming quickness, and she could feel a faint sting developing on her skin from the long exposure to the polluted rain. She felt increasingly conscious of the time as the visibility contracted with the waning afternoon, but she kept moving—silent, methodical—Keita’s footsteps solid and constant next to hers. It crossed her mind that she should not feel so comforted by the presence of a man who had just threatened to kill her, but there was no one else she would have chosen to be at her side in a fight.

It was almost a relief when the colonists started shooting.

She heard the pulse impact and Ruby’s shriek at the same moment. They were still a meter away from the shattered storefront they had chosen as their latest shelter, and the shot blasted a fireball into the ground just before them. As one Elena and Keita dodged around it, their strides lengthening, and they dove into the dirt behind the wrecked building. There was another shot, and for a moment Elena thought they had lost the girl. But an instant later she scrambled in between them, arms over her head, abruptly willing to risk sharing the shelter of the soldier who had wanted her dead.

“Where?” Elena asked.

Keita nodded behind them. “That garage we passed, just after Savin’s spot.”

“Long range?”

He checked his ammunition. “I’ve got three.”

“I’ve got five.”

“You’re a crappy shot with a rifle.”

Fair point.

He took aim and squeezed the trigger. An instant later the roof of the garage blew apart, leaving a corner of the structure on fire. A volley of shots came their way, peppering the ground before their ruined shelter. The colonists were not terrific shots themselves, she reflected, but it was enough—Jimmy would never get Niree through that.

She aimed her own rifle and fired back conventional pulse shots as Keita took aim again. She heard him inhale, then exhale. An instant later the rest of the structure burst into flames. Five seconds, ten: no more fire. Are they waiting? She caught sight of Jimmy and Savin through the smoke and flames, running across the remains of the city block. Savin had placed himself between Jimmy and the garage, and was firing one-handed as they ran past.

She thought they might make it.

Elena kept up her shooting as they ran, although she never saw anyone hidden in the dense rubble of what was left of the city, never knew what she was aiming at. Ruby had grown silent, and the one time Elena looked at her she saw the girl’s eyes had gone dull and cold.

Probably for the best.

At long last, with less than four minutes left, they caught sight of the ship, waiting in what had once been the town square. Four of the colonists swarmed around it, running their hands over it, and Elena swore.

Next to her Keita let out a chuckle. “Anything goes until they touch your baby, right, Songbird?”

Elena aimed at one of the colonists, then dropped the nose of her rifle and shot toward the ground. A chunk of cement erupted a meter in front of him. He started, and as he turned, she risked speaking.

“Get away from that ship or we will kill you!” It wasn’t much of a threat, but there was little else she could do.

The man—boy, woman; she could not tell from this distance what the emaciated figure had been—shot toward her voice. The round exploded the corner of the building they were crouched behind. She swore again, then did what she had heard Keita do: she inhaled, exhaled, and fired.

The figure’s chest burst with a brief flame, and he dropped.

Somewhat startled by having hit her target, Elena aimed at another, but the rest turned and ran, leaving their fallen comrade behind. She kept her rifle pointed at the motionless form, aware of Keita next to her doing the same. After a moment, Jimmy and Savin came around them, running for the ship, and it was clear Elena’s target wasn’t getting up.

She engaged her comm. “Open the door,” she told the shuttle.

The door slid open. She saw Jimmy haul himself inside and begin to lower Niree to the floor. Savin took an instant to stop by the man Elena had shot—the man she had killed—and scoop up his weapon. Then he, too, jumped onto the ship, crouching in the open doorway to provide cover.

She straightened, ready to run; and only then did she notice Keita looking off to one side. He was frowning, his whole body alert. Next to him, Ruby was staring at their ship, her expression dazed and faintly hopeful.

“Keita.”

“Ssh,” he said brusquely. “Can’t you hear it?”

She listened. She heard rain, Ruby’s breathing, her own heartbeat. “Keita, we have to go now.”

He turned to her. His anger was gone, replaced by something urgent and determined. “I need two minutes.”

“We do not have two minutes!”

“Then give me what we do have.”

He stared at her steadily, unwavering. She wondered, if she tried to order him, if he would listen to her. She wondered what she would do if she had to leave without him.

It was not her choice.

“We take off in ninety-six seconds,” she told him.

In a flash he was gone, dashing off into the darkening city. Without looking she clapped her hand around Ruby’s scrawny arm and pulled her forward, running full-tilt for the ship.

She released the girl as soon as they leapt on, heading for the cockpit. “Time.”

“Eighty-four seconds,” the ship told her calmly.

“Lift off at eighty-three and a half.” She met Ruby’s eyes and pointed to the bench along the far wall, where Lieutenant Treharne had been sitting when they arrived … forty-six minutes ago.

Christ.

“Sit down, buckle up, and be still,” she commanded. Ruby did as she was told, and Elena thought her quick obedience had probably helped her survive this far. She stepped over to Jimmy, who had strapped Niree down onto another bench and was applying the ship’s med scanner. “Will she make it?” she asked.

He looked at her, his expression unreadable. “We didn’t do her any favors, hauling her out like that.” At her look, he acquiesced. “Yes, I think so.”

“Strap in for takeoff, then.”

She heard the engines igniting and checked the time. Twenty-eight seconds—he wasn’t going to make it. They would come back for him, of course, for what it was worth, but not even Dmitri Keita was going to survive a day and a half in this place.

Climbing into the pilot’s seat, she did a perfunctory preflight check. She keyed in the course home, compensating for the rapidly contracting weather pattern.

“Flight in this weather is not recommended,” the ship told her. “Heavy turbulence is likely.”

I know, I know … “Hang on,” she called to the others. “This won’t be comfortable.”

At seven seconds, she heard feet outside the door and saw Savin tense. But then Keita was on board, drenched and covered in mud, something dark and wet clutched against his chest. “Go!” he shouted at her.

She was ready for him. She jerked the controls, and the ship jolted off the ground with three seconds to spare.

Normally Elena was a careful pilot. The infantry liked to fly with her. When there was turbulence, she would engage the artificial gravity just enough to temper the disruption of the atmosphere.

Today was definitely not normal.

She shot them straight up, as fast as they would go, allowing the planet’s gravity to press down on them. She stared into the atmosphere, peering at the darkening clouds, looking for the fastest path out of the weather.

Through her concentration she heard a sound behind her, and she wondered if Keita’s bundle was a cat.

Her viewscreen began to glow red, and her attention was dragged back to the task of flying. Great, she thought, the planet’s particulate atmosphere is ripping into our hull. Elena whispered a quiet apology to the ship, thinking herself ahead twenty minutes, picturing herself home on Exeter, standing in the shuttle bay while her chief berated her for the state of her vessel. She would be days repairing it.

“Inversion in five,” she told them, and counted down the seconds.

Moments later the artificial gravity engaged, abruptly reorienting them. She heard retching behind her; that was likely the girl. Elena usually took pride in gentle inversions, but today it had seemed slightly less important.

The night opened up before her, dark and pure and scattered with stars, and the glow of heat faded as the vacuum of space cooled their exterior. She sat back and closed her eyes. They were alive.

Most of them.

That sound again. She frowned. It wasn’t Ruby—she could hear the girl alternating between retching and sobbing, Jimmy offering her quiet words of comfort. She turned around. Savin, still relaxed, was watching over Niree as Jimmy rubbed Ruby’s back and held a bucket before her.

Keita sat in the corner, looking down at a bundle of muddy, sodden rags in his arms. She heard the sound again, and then a quiet response from him.

Is he singing?

She got to her feet and walked the length of the ship to stand over him. In his arms, wrapped in what looked like old shirts, was a baby. Elena knew little of such things, but she guessed it was no more than a few hours old. It was wide-awake, but it was not crying. Instead, it was studying Keita with enormous, somber purple eyes, that odd color some babies were born with. Every few moments it opened its mouth to make that small sound, a mew of greeting or protest; and Keita responded each time, rocking the infant gently.

“Jimmy should look at it,” she said.

“Her.” Keita’s eyes never left the infant’s. “And she’s fine.”

She stood for a moment, watching the incongruous scene, then retreated, making her way back to the pilot’s seat. She would have to comm Exeter, let them know Treharne was dead and that they had rescued only two of the colonists. In a day and a half a larger crew would go down, more heavily armed, properly prepared after the report she would give them.

She wondered how many colonists would be left.

She closed her eyes, remembered aiming her rifle, her futile warning. On that planet, killing would have been a mercy. He had been emaciated, close to death, or at least close to the point where his companions would pull him apart to keep themselves alive a little longer. He had been trying to kill them, too; but really, she had done him a favor.

She saw the flame bloom in his chest, saw him drop.

Elena opened her eyes, sat up straight, and opened a channel to make her report.

PART I

CHAPTER 1
Orunmila

Guanyin was always amazed by how well puppies could sleep.

Samedi had slid into the narrow space between her pregnant belly and the wall, his body twisted like soft pastry, and was snoring blissfully into her ear as she stared at the ceiling. When he had first dozed off she had tried blowing on his nose. The first two times he had twitched, but the third time he was oblivious. She could almost certainly get out of bed without disturbing him, but she needed him as an excuse. If she sat up she would feel obligated to stand, and if she stood, she would feel obligated to talk to Cali about the warship Central Corps had just dropped in their backyard.

Cali would expect her to have worked it out, to have a plan of action. She had always looked to Guanyin for direction, even when they were children. Cali was three years older, but she had always been more comfortable as Guanyin’s foot soldier than as her mentor. Guanyin knew many in her crew expected her to choose Cali as her second-in-command, and certainly she could trust Cali with her life. But for a first officer, Guanyin needed an adviser, someone who could help challenge her thinking. That was not Cali.

That was Chanyu, the ship’s former captain, but he had retired. They had left him on Prokofiev’s third moon, waiting for a shuttle to the Fifth Sector. She could probably find him if she needed to, but she knew what he would say. “You must find your own way, Guanyin. Orunmila is yours now. She lives or dies under your command. And remember, dear girl, she wouldn’t be yours if they didn’t believe in you. All you need to do is be worthy of them.” Chanyu had raised her, and she loved him like a father, but she never could stand it when he spouted that sort of useless rubbish.

Guanyin was twenty-nine years old, pregnant with her sixth child, and captain of a starship that was home to 812 people. She had no second-in-command and no advisers, and it was down to her to figure out how to respond to a deployment buildup from the largest, best-armed government in the galaxy.

“It’s only one ship,” Yunru had remarked over dinner with their children. “It may not mean what you think it means.” Which had occurred to her, of course. The CCSS Galileo was small for a Central starship, half the size of Exeter, the ship Orunmila most often dealt with. But unlike the equally small science ship CCSS Cassia, Galileo was unambiguously a warship. Central was not entirely inept at diplomacy, but they always felt the need to back it up with weapons. Galileo was spectacularly well equipped to do just that.

Not that she couldn’t understand why Central would feel the need to build up their weaponry in the Third Sector. Numerous multiyear crop failures had led to an increase in intersystem squabbles and civil wars, and the Syndicate tribes, finding larger markets for contraband, were becoming bolder and more aggressive. But when Galileo had appeared a few weeks ago, contacting supply chains and shipping companies as if she had been in the Third Sector for years, Guanyin had found their polite diplomatic greeting entirely inadequate.

It had taken Guanyin very little research to remind herself where she had heard the ship’s name before. Galileo had been credited last year with preventing an all-out war in the Fifth Sector. No less than Valeria Solomonoff herself, the Fifth Sector’s most venerable PSI captain, had signed a treaty with Central through Galileo. Galileo’s captain, a man called Greg Foster, was widely considered to be an accomplished diplomat.

Guanyin disliked diplomats. She always found they were too good at lying for her taste. So when Greg Foster had contacted her, ostensibly to introduce his ship, she had been cold, unfriendly, and more than a little blunt.

“You waste your time with me, Captain Foster,” she had told him. “It is the Syndicates attacking your ships, not us.”

The last six months had seen a marked increase in Syndicate raider activity, and for the first time in decades they had included Central Corps starships in their targets. PSI, who had dealt with raiders for centuries, was the obvious place for Central to turn when formulating their own strategies for dealing with guerrilla attacks. A request for help Guanyin might have understood, the sort of short-term alliance PSI and the Corps had formed repeatedly over the centuries. She did not understand this amorphous buildup of Central’s power, and it bothered her.

What is Central planning?

The baby rolled and kicked, and Samedi woke up, his wolfish face next to hers. She reached up a hand and rubbed him reassuringly between the ears. “Do you suppose they are trying to trick us, little one?” she asked. “Or do they fear something specific, and don’t want to tell us what it is?”

Samedi gazed at her with his contented, worshipful eyes, and sneezed in her face.

Cali heard her roll out of bed, and came in from the sitting room to lean against the bathroom doorframe as Guanyin washed her face. “He’s too young to be in bed with you,” Cali said.

“When he’s old enough he’ll be too big.”

“You slept with Shuja when he weighed more than you did.”

“Shuja never weighed that much.” Actually, Cali was right: Shuja had topped out at sixty kilos before he had started dropping weight due to illness and old age. Guanyin only broke fifty-five when she was pregnant. But she had been pregnant for half of Shuja’s adult life, and she had grown used to having a dog curled up next to her expanding stomach. “Samedi will learn.”

Cali crossed her arms and glowered.

“Your face will freeze that way, you know.”

Not that it would matter if it did, of course. Cali was beautiful, and she knew it, breaking hearts without thinking much about it. Guanyin, who never doubted her own place in Cali’s heart, yelled at her sometimes, but it made no difference, and she supposed Cali would have to grow out of it on her own. But Guanyin knew one of the reasons she had reacted to Captain Foster the way she had was because he reminded her of Cali, right down to the polite condescension.

Guanyin turned away from the sink. “Can I ask you something?”

Cali pushed herself off the doorframe as Guanyin walked past and asked Orunmila for some music. Guanyin settled back onto the bed next to the patient puppy, wide-awake now and wagging his entire body, trying and failing to resist licking her face. “No, love,” she said sternly, and he backed off onto his haunches, waiting for her to change her mind.

Cali pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. “Is this about the Corps captain?”

“He talked to me like you do, sometimes. Like I’m helpless, or too young to understand. He seemed to think I would find him persuasive and comforting, just because he has a nice smile, never mind the volume of weapons his ship is carrying into our territory.”

At that, Cali grinned. “Did you swear at him?”

It was Guanyin’s turn to glower. “Why do you do it? When you know I understand all this better than you do. Why do you treat me like a child?”

Cali shrugged and looked away. “Because I love you, I suppose, and I don’t like that things are hard for you. I want to do it for you, even when I can’t.”

That was a surprisingly introspective observation for Cali. “Captain Foster doesn’t love me.”

“Maybe you remind him of someone else.”

“Maybe he thinks, because I’m new, I’m a fool.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. He dealt with Valeria Solomonoff in the Fifth Sector. You really think she let him get away with shit like this?”

“Maybe she doesn’t like him, either.”

“I spoke to her. She trusts him. She said, and I quote, ‘He is fighting what we are fighting.’ You know what she didn’t say?”

“I wasn’t there, Guanyin.”

“She didn’t say ‘He is a good soldier.’ So why is he talking to me as if there is nothing going on?”

Cali leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “You know, Guanyin, you could ask him. I mean, instead of trying to analyze what Solomonoff really meant, or poking at my character flaws.”

She sighed, gently tugging Samedi’s soft ears. “I was rude to him.”

“They’re rude to us all the time, and they’ve still told one of their captains to kiss your ass.” Cali shrugged. “They want something. Find out what it is. Maybe we can get something in return.”

Admittedly, that was not terrible advice. “What could they possibly want from us?”

At her words, Samedi launched himself at her again, and she had to close her eyes against his silky-soft tongue. “Hopefully puppies,” Cali said dryly, and Guanyin laughed.

The comm on her wall chimed, and Aida spoke without waiting for acknowledgment. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Captain Shiang,” he said, “but we’re receiving a distress call.”

She could hear it in his voice: tension and fear. She sat up, her hand resting on Samedi’s head. “Acknowledge and reroute,” she told him, knowing he would have started the process already. “Who is it?”

“It’s a Central starship, ma’am,” he said. “Captain—it’s Exeter.”

She met Cali’s eyes. They had not seen Exeter in more than six months—since before Chanyu’s retirement—but they had run countless missions with her for a decade. She had thought to wonder, just that morning, why Central had not had Exeter arrange for her to meet Galileo’s captain, instead of expecting her to accept the goodwill of a stranger. She wondered if Captain Çelik was still at Exeter’s helm.

She wondered if he was all right.

“What are they up against?” She swung her feet to the floor and stood, all her fatigue washed away by adrenaline.

“Syndicate ships, Captain. They’re reporting twenty-seven.”

Twenty-seven raiders. Against a Central starship. “How close are we?”

“Two minutes, eight seconds, ma’am.”

“Get all weapons online,” she told him. “Orunmila, call battle stations ship-wide.”

The lights shifted to blue, and the quiet, repeating alarm came over the ship’s public comm system. Cali fell into step behind her as she rushed out of her quarters into the hallway.

Raiders were often reckless—and occasionally suicidal—but attacking Central was a recent tactic. There had been three attacks over the last six months, always the usual smash-and-grab, and only one had been at all successful. So many raiders against a single starship … the Syndicates were never so bold. An attack so aggressive was insanity. Even if they scored against Exeter, who was well armed in her own right, Central could not let the attack stand. This battle, whatever the cause, was only the start, and the Syndicates had to know that.

She thought again of Galileo’s abrupt appearance, and wondered how much Central had known in advance.

CHAPTER 2
Galileo

Took on parts at Lakota, Greg Foster wrote. Four days’ travel en route to Shixin. Fucked up the latest negotiations with PSI.

No. It was not the sort of report he would be allowed to file.

He swept a finger through the offending paragraph to delete it and stared, frustrated, at the nearly empty document. Realistically, writing the report should have taken no more than half an hour—less if he wrote in generalities—but he was fairly certain insufficient detail would cause Admiral Herrod to bounce the report right back with orders to do it over. Even with a proper level of information, though, he would need to take some care with his word choice. Allowing his frustration to bleed through onto the page would not help his shaky standing with the Admiralty.

Looking back on his conversation with the PSI captain, he couldn’t blame her for being suspicious. Galileo was hardly a stealth ship—even before the blowup last year, Greg’s ship and her crew had kept a fairly high profile in the squabble-ridden Fourth Sector. And their first foray into the Fifth Sector had involved a set of incidents that had almost provoked all-out war between Central and the PSI ships in that region. He had known Galileo’s precipitous deployment to the Third Sector, done without so much as a polite forewarning for the non-Corps ships in the area, was likely to be misinterpreted. What he hadn’t quite understood was how little his experiences in the Fifth Sector would matter here.

Shiang Guanyin, captain of the PSI ship Orunmila, had viewed Galileo’s arrival with hair-trigger paranoia, and he could not blame her. But even so, he had been surprised to find himself so far unable to open any kind of dialogue with her at all.

“Thank you for the introduction,” she had said, her Standard enunciated carefully. “Should we find ourselves requiring anything at all from you or your government, we will let you know.” And she had terminated the comm.

He did not have to review his diplomatic training to recognize she felt insulted, and by more than Galileo’s presence. Clearly something in how he had presented himself had put her off.

He had considered more than once just telling her the truth: that Galileo’s presence had nothing to do with PSI, or even the resource issues in the Third Sector. Central was indeed spread too thin, the supply chains delivering raw materials for construction having been constrained for years; but Galileo had been reassigned for an entirely different reason. He could tell Captain Shiang, he supposed, that he was only there so his superiors could make sure he remembered who called the shots. But he did not think that would inspire confidence in either him or Central Gov.

Although it would certainly torpedo what’s left of my career.

Weary of his mind running in circles, he rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger and let his attention drift to the window. There were no stars for him to contemplate, just the silver-blue brightness of the FTL field moderated by Galileo’s polarizers. They would be in the field another three hours before they stopped to recharge, and another five days before finally reaching their supply pickup. If he finished this damn report, he could enjoy some peace and quiet for a change. The last six months had been, in some ways, the most eventful of his fourteen-year career.

There was the court-martial and its outcome, of course, about which he was still not sure what to think. What had happened the year before had been too public for the Admiralty to cover up, and they had struggled to come up with charges that reflected the seriousness of the events but didn’t alienate a public that seemed inclined to see both Greg and Elena as heroes. In the end they were charged with insubordination and destruction of government property, although the public record of the trial was coy about exactly what that property had been.

The final verdict—splitting hairs over specific charges, making them appear to be something between naively innocent and subversively guilty—had turned out to be strangely toothless. He and Elena had been taken off the promotion lists—her for a year, him for two—and they had each been assigned their own personal admiral with whom they were required to file monthly mission reports for the next half year. The most concrete changes were Galileo’s reassignment from her usual Fourth Sector patrol to the Third Sector, and the deployment of a dozen recent Academy graduates who probably shouldn’t have made it past their first year.

Which meant that, yes, they had been sent a message. Just not one that made sense to Greg. Anyone who thought subtle insults would alter either his or her conviction that they had done exactly the right thing was unfamiliar with both of them to the point of absurdity.

But it was more than his professional life that had changed. For the first time in thirteen years—since he had deployed at the arrogant, self-assured age of twenty-four—he was unmarried and unattached, and he had not considered the impact that would have on his day-to-day life. There had always been people who saw his marriage as a challenge rather than a deterrent, but its absence had brought him a whole new population of admirers that he had no idea how to properly deflect. His usual techniques were not as effective on this crowd, and he often found himself caught flat-footed while trying to let someone down kindly. Having a wife had provided a buffer between him and the natural impulses of a crew that spent months in close quarters. He had been working to include himself more in their day-to-day lives, and many of them seemed happy to welcome him in without limits.

Jessica Lockwood, his newly minted second-in-command, had tried to explain it to him. “They’re just happy for you, sir,” she had told him, as if that explained everything. Jessica always put him in mind of his sister: practical and irrepressible, indulgent with what she perceived to be his shortcomings. Jessica would never come right out and tell him he was an emotional idiot, but he was pretty sure she thought it frequently.

And then there were the people who expressed sympathy about his divorce—which he found equally puzzling. He did not doubt their intentions, but he did not understand how they could so thoroughly misread how he felt. Even Jessica tiptoed around the subject of Caroline, as if his ex-wife were a land mine or a raw nerve. In truth, he almost never thought of her, all the pain and resentment of their fourteen-year marriage having vanished for him even before the dissolution was finalized. Most days he felt light, more buoyant than he had felt since he was a child, and nobody seemed to notice.

Well, almost nobody.

Resigning himself to the impulse, he engaged his comm in text mode. “You up?” he asked.

A brief pause, and the word Yes appeared in the air half a meter before his eyes.

“You done yet?”

No.

He shouldn’t ask. He had no business asking. Things between them had not yet healed. “You want to come finish here?”

A longer pause this time. Then: Do you have tea?

“I will by the time you get here.”

She rang the door chime when she arrived. This was a regression—for years she had walked into his office unannounced, confident of her welcome. But showing up at all … that was progress. Glacial and frustrating, but progress.

He had Galileo open the door, and his chief of engineering walked in. Elena Shaw, his closest friend before he had blown it all up, still the person he trusted above anyone else. He had thought, for years, that what he felt for her was complicated, designed to trip him up when he least expected it. For a time, he had thought her presence was a curse. It was only recently, when faced with losing her, that he had recognized what he felt for her was simple. What was complicated was coping with it.

Oblivious to his ruminating, she dropped into the chair across from him and wrapped her fingers around the mug of hot tea. “So how far did you get?” she asked.

She was watching him with those eyes of hers, sharp and perceptive and bright with intelligence. Also dark and beautiful and so easy to get lost in. She was not pretty the way many of the women on his ship were pretty: her features were too uneven, the balance thrown off by her huge eyes and substantial nose. But there was an elegance about her, the way she moved, the way she spoke, as if she were some creature of earth and fire, liquid and molten. He often thought he could spend the rest of his days quite happily doing nothing but watching her.

In fact, he had said this to his father when he had visited last month. The older man had shaken his head, and said it was a damn good thing Greg had gotten divorced.

More proof he knows me better than I thought he did.

“Through last week,” he replied to Elena’s question.

She rolled her eyes, leaning back and lifting the mug close to her face. “I’m three weeks behind,” she confessed. “I have too much work to do for this shit.”

“It’s not about the report. It’s about reminding us who’s the boss.”

She knew that, of course. They had discussed the outcome at the time, and both understood the court-martial could have ended quite differently. The Admiralty would have been well within its rights to throw them out of the service entirely—saving the sector be damned. They hadn’t, and the one conclusion he and Elena had come up with was that the Admiralty simply couldn’t agree on what to do with them. “Some of them wanted to give you a medal,” Admiral Herrod had told Greg shortly after the trial’s conclusion. “Some of them wanted to separate the two of you.” At that the old man had frowned, and for a moment Greg had the impression that the typically circumspect admiral was speaking entirely off the record. “Whatever else you do, Foster—don’t let them separate you. And watch your back.”

It was a precaution Greg had already thought about, but hearing Herrod suggest it, when he couldn’t be sure where the man’s loyalties lay, left Greg feeling even more uncertain and unsafe.

When he had repeated Herrod’s words to Elena, she had only said, “Where does he think we would go?”

She was watching him now through the steam from her tea. “You should have Jessie do it for you,” she told him.

“She doesn’t write like me.”

“You think Herrod gives a damn?”

“Why don’t you ask her to do yours?”

She gave him a mock glare. “You promoted her over me, remember?”

“Okay, then get Galileo to do it.”

“Which is not a terrible idea,” she agreed, “apart from the fact that Galileo wouldn’t write like me at all.”

“So we can’t get around this,” he concluded, resigned.

She set the mug down on the desk. “Thirty minutes, no talking, we knock these out and we’re done with it.”

“And promise ourselves not to leave it to the last minute next month.”

She grinned. “That too.”

They both fell silent, and Greg returned to figuring out how to describe his discussions with PSI. He wrote and erased the section of his report four times, aware he was attracting Elena’s attention. At last he leaned back, frustrated. “I don’t know how to say this,” he said.

“What have you got?”

“I just deleted it.” At her look, he added, “I can’t just tell him ‘I said this, and she said that.’ I know Herrod. He’s not going to give me any leeway, not in an official document. The man doesn’t like me.”

“It’s not personal. The man is doing a job, just like you are.” When he said nothing, she extended a hand toward his document. “Let me try.”

“You don’t write like me, either.”

“So wordsmith it when I’m done.”

He let her tug the document to her side of the desk, watching her set her own aside. She read his last paragraph and frowned, then wrote rapidly for a moment. When she was finished, she pushed the document back over to him.

He read. “This is a lie.”

“It is not.”

“Negotiations are not ‘ongoing.’ I’m trying to figure out how I could possibly respond to her without sounding like an asshole.”

“The most important thing about diplomacy,” Elena said, “is not the goal. It’s establishing communication. You’ve done that.” He glared, and she shook her head. “How can you be such a good diplomat, and so lousy at managing your own chain of command?”

“I’m not a good diplomat. That’s the problem.” But he reread her words. They were not bad. He reached in and reordered a phrase—she had nailed his voice pretty well. If you use this, he reminded himself, you can be finished. “Herrod will peg this for bullshit.”

“Of course he will.” She had turned back to her own work. “He’s a bright person. But you’ll have made the effort to spin it, and that’s what he wants.” She made a few notes, then sat back. “There.”

“You wrote up three weeks already?”

She shrugged. “I’m a mechanic. My life is much less interesting than yours.”

“Plus Admiral Waris likes you.”

Elena’s supervisor, Ilona Waris, had been a mechanics teacher when Elena was at Central’s military academy on Earth, and Elena’s aptitude had rapidly secured her place as the teacher’s favorite. Waris had kept track of Elena’s career, occasionally offering unsolicited advice, but Greg had always had the sense that Elena found the woman overbearing. Elena had no ambition—she would not even have been chief if Galileo’s old chief hadn’t been killed—but she had enough political savvy to keep from completely rebuffing Waris’s sporadic attempts to keep in touch.

Elena had paused, and was looking at him, her expression troubled. “She voted to acquit us,” she said.

“Is that bad?”

“She said … how did she put it? ‘Your careers shouldn’t be hamstrung over one bad call in the field.’ ”

Bad call. He could tell from her expression she disagreed with the term as much as he did. “You think she’s on the other side?”

The other side meant Shadow Ops, an organization within Central’s official government that wielded far more power than most people knew. S-O had been knee-deep in the events that had ended with their trial. Not that they could prove any of it, of course. All of the physical evidence was gone, and S-O’s public face was one of benign, largely ineffective bureaucracy. But they both knew differently, and he knew she was aware of the implications of Admiral Waris’s statement. Acquittal would have meant Central could have sent them off anywhere, unsupervised. They could have been separated, isolated from each other, alone with their suspicions and without resources to pursue them. Or they could have vanished without a trace, just a couple of random, unrelated accidents, and no one would even have asked the question.

“I think,” Elena told him, “that presuming on an old acquaintance would be incalculably foolish. So I will be a boring mechanic in my reports, and she can check off a box, and she and I can smile at each other with our fingers crossed behind our backs.”

Trust was the biggest casualty of the events of the last year. Elena, despite her years of experience in the Corps, used to trust her superiors to be in the right, at least as far as their intentions were concerned. The loss was a small one, he suspected, but it was a loss all the same, on the heels of far too many others. “Elena,” he began, “you know I—”

A high tone sounded, and the wall readout flashed red. He stood, but across from him Elena was already moving, sweeping away both of their documents with a wave of her hand and pulling up a tactical view of Galileo. Out the window the field dimmed and dissipated into stars, and they hung still for a moment as the ship changed their flight plan. Then the stars blurred and they were in the field again, and if he had not heard the alarm he would have thought nothing had changed.

A priority Central distress call.

All ships in the vicinity, help us.

“Status,” he said tersely. Above his desk, his ship rendered a reconstructed tactical display of a starship similar in design to Galileo, only three times the size: a great sprawling eagle rather than a sparrow. The CCSS Exeter. He stole a glance at Elena, who was staring at the display, her jaw set. In addition to being the Corps ship that had patrolled the Third Sector the longest, Exeter had been Elena’s first deployment. She still knew people who served there.

Emily Broadmoor, Greg’s chief of security and infantry commander, entered the room as Galileo gave status. “CCSS Exeter reports being under attack by twenty-seven Syndicate raiders. Current readings count twenty.”

Twenty-seven. He could not recall ever hearing of a Syndicate tribe so large.

“Additional status is available,” Galileo added helpfully.

Jessica came in, trailed by Greg’s medical and comms officers. He caught her eye. “Give us what you’ve got,” he told his ship, as Jessica moved to stand beside him.

The display animated with twenty-seven small ships, replaying the status relayed by Exeter’s sensors. The small ships spiraled in eerie unison, blasting somewhat futilely at Exeter’s solid hull. Exeter was firing back with external weapons, but her response was sluggish, and the raiders looped and dashed and avoided more shots than they took. As they all watched, one raider split from the others, heading abruptly toward Exeter’s belly. Exeter shot at the small fighter, a single gun, over and over again. She missed each time.

The little ship pitched and yawed like a drunken soldier, and for a moment Greg hoped against hope that it would miss Exeter entirely. But as they watched, it sped up and lurched into Exeter’s side.

Greg’s office was lit by the playback of the massive blast, and when it faded there was a flaming crescent carved out of Exeter’s side, debris flying out of the gap. One-third of the starship had vanished. That the ship had survived to send a distress call was a minor miracle.

Greg’s fists clenched involuntarily as they watched the remainder of the reenactment. He knew it was already over, but he found himself waiting for the battle to go differently, for their gunner’s aim to improve, for some impossible sign that Exeter would recover. Instead, a single raider flew, unmolested, into Exeter’s wrecked side and attached itself like a limpet to the open wound. The remaining raiders kept circling the starship, drawing Exeter’s meager fire. Five of the tiny ships flamed out in the path of the starship’s crippled weapons. Someone with some skill had found their way to the targeting controls.

Or maybe, Greg reflected, thinking of the futile shots before the impact, they were just luckier than they had been before.

A moment later the reconstruction looped back to the beginning, and Greg dismissed it. “Audio?” he prompted.

A voice began to speak, garbled by digital artifacting. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” a deep voice said. Greg recognized Captain Çelik. “We are under attack. Syndicate raiders. We’re down to one gun, no shuttles. All ships in the area, please respond. Emergency. All ships—”

The voice broke off.

Christ.

The Syndicates had never moved so boldly against Central. There were skirmishes, sure—over the past year, there had been a handful of swipes taken at Corps starships, but nothing remotely this aggressive. Their goal had always been theft and escape, not engagement.

What the hell could have prompted this?

But the why of it was secondary for now. “ETA?”

“Three minutes, fifty-eight seconds.”

Too long. “Has anyone else acknowledged the Mayday?”

“The PSI ship Orunmila will arrive in one minute and seven seconds.”

With Orunmila’s help, Exeter might stand a chance. Thank God, he thought, for spiky, suspicious PSI captains. He looked up. “I want two ships on deck for a boarding party. Two platoons, armored. That limpet likely means they were boarded. And Bob, I want a full medical team in with the infantry.” Surely there would be survivors. Surely there would be some hope to salvage out of all of this. “Mr. Mosqueda, I want all comms in and out monitored, and I want to know what they heard before they got hit. Chief,” he told Elena, “you’re on weapons, and watch out for jammers. I don’t know why Exeter couldn’t defend themselves, but if those bastards try that same trick with us, blow them apart. Commander Lockwood, you’re with me. I want this over fast, everyone. We’re not losing anyone else.”

He watched them disperse, all efficiency and purpose, and tried not to imagine the crew of Exeter, not three minutes earlier, doing exactly the same thing.

CHAPTER 3

Elena ran down the hall, thinking back to the last time she had been in a firefight. The battle had been on a much smaller scale, but the odds had been overwhelmingly against her, and the outcome had been far less certain. Strange how little she remembered of the actual shooting. Most of her memories were of her companion: levelheaded, experienced, strong, and good-humored, even in the face of what had seemed like certain death. He had stood with her, unwavering, despite the fact that she had brought him all of his trouble, that he had known her only a day. Here, diving into a fight to save what was left of Exeter, she thought of how invulnerable she had felt when she was with him, how she could fight anything. She let the memory flood her bloodstream, leaving her cool and determined. You’ve done this before. You can do this again.

She entered engineering, her eyes sweeping over her crew. They were already at their stations, subdued but composed, even the new kids who were dumped on Greg before they left Earth. She tried to remember how many battle drills she had done with them. She tried to remember if battle drills had helped her at all the first time she had been shot at. She didn’t think so. Real-world battle had little to do with drills, and everything to do with who you were underneath.

She would have spared them this early test if she could.

Ted Shimada, her second, was waiting to take her aside, pulling her away from the others before she could reach the main weapons console. “What do you think we’re facing here?” he asked, his voice low enough to keep the others from overhearing.

She studied his expression. Ted’s reputation as a clown was not entirely undeserved, but she had known him for more than ten years, and she knew his clowning masked a sharp and observant mind. He was one of a short list of people whose judgment she trusted absolutely, and the only one—with the possible exception of Greg—whom she would trust to look after her engines. He would have noticed the same anomalies in the replay of Exeter’s hit that she had.

“Your paycheck and mine says the bomber was a drone,” she replied, “although whoever was remoting the thing didn’t know what they were doing. Most of the others are drones, too, but based on the flight pattern I’m guessing those are autopilot.” That would give Galileo a tactical advantage; autopilots in drones that size were almost always less imaginative than human operators.

“Especially with most of those Syndicate bastards too cowardly to risk their own skins hitting a Corps starship.” His jaw worked, and he looked away from her for a moment. “Shit, Lanie.”

“Later, Ted.” She put her hand on his arm, just for a moment. “Let’s get them out of this first.”

Easy enough to say.

She turned to the weapons console, taking in the bank of green indicators. She could see, in her mind, over and over, the replay of Exeter’s destruction. There might be survivors—if the ship’s environmentals had survived to seal in the atmosphere—but there would be many, many dead. And she would know their names.

Not now.

She heard the engine’s harmonic change as the field generator began to spin down, and then Greg’s voice over ship-wide comms: “All hands, enemy engaged.”

They dropped into normal space.

She had expected to see Exeter, to be facing its destroyed underbelly, burned and twisted metal over the exposed bones of the ship’s structure. Instead, she saw a massive, unfamiliar flat bulkhead scattered with lines of windows, and a swarm of those Syndicate drones firing into the dark hull. She glanced over at the generated tactical view to find they had emerged on top of another ship, larger and bulkier than Galileo, its graceful, hybrid lines identifying it as the PSI ship Orunmila. She beamed a silent thank you to its captain. If Orunmila had not been so close, she was not sure they would have found anything left of Exeter at all.

“Launch shuttles,” Greg was saying. “Emily, draw those snipers off the PSI ship. Galileo, head to Exeter’s other side.”

Galileo moved upward until she cleared Orunmila, then sped opposite the PSI ship to Exeter. Elena watched Galileo’s troop shuttles appear on the tactical readout. Exeter was still fighting, albeit with only one weapons bank—automatic defenses, or did they have crew left to man her remaining guns?—but the bulk of the raiders were focused on Orunmila. Elena frowned. “Why aren’t they protecting the boarding ship?” she asked.

And then she saw it.

Their flyby allowed her an unobstructed view of the raider that had attached itself, leech-like, to Exeter’s charred hull, and she swore when she saw where it was clamped. “They’re over Exeter’s generator battery,” she said grimly, her comm open so Greg would hear as well. Galileo couldn’t shoot at the raider, because taking out that ship would take out the generator, triggering an explosion that would then take out Exeter, Galileo, and Orunmila—not to mention irradiate the travel corridor for weeks.

“I see it, Chief,” Greg said. “Anything from Exeter at all?”

“Their comms are all dead.” But they were still firing that single gun, and making more shots than they missed. She didn’t think their traumatized automated system would be making such accurate shots. Surely there were still people inside, alive, fighting. People who could handle invaders on foot.

Then again, maybe it was only wishful thinking.

Elena saw half a dozen drones peel off Orunmila to follow Emily’s shuttles as they docked on Exeter’s intact side. Ted tracked and shot two of them, and Orunmila three; the shuttles handled the last one, maneuvering themselves against Exeter’s dark hull. “Stay on them, Ted,” Elena said, but Ted was ahead of her, taking out every drone that angled for an attack. One of the raiders caught the wing of one of the shuttles as it docked; she winced, but the shuttle fired in return, and the drone disintegrated in a silent flare.

Who’s hurt? Who’s hurt? Who’s hurt? But there was no time for that now. “Galileo, what’s the status of the limpet?”

“Engines are on standby,” Galileo said. “Internal atmosphere and gravity normal. Field generator running two-thirds above recommended levels.”

She switched her comm to the captain. “Greg, bring us around by that attached ship.”

“We can’t fire on her,” Ted warned.

“Not until she detaches,” Elena agreed. “But when she does, she’s going to rabbit. She’s half spun up already.”

His eyes widened. “A ship that small? She’ll pull herself to pieces.”

“And save us the trouble,” she said grimly. “She’ll need to pull away from Exeter to build the field without the whole thing going up.”

“Not a suicide mission, then.”

“When have raiders had the nerve for suicide?”

He threw her a nervous grin, and hovered over the tactical readout. “Galileo, target that ship. As soon as she’s minimum safe distance from Exeter, take her out.”

“Minimum safe distance is undetermined,” Galileo said calmly. “Calculation depends on unknowns.”

Galileo meant cargo, and possibly fuel levels, not to mention potential booby traps. “Manual targeting, then,” Elena instructed, meeting Ted’s eyes. “Watch that ship. Watch how it flies. If we assume they want to survive, they won’t take a risk. There’ll be a tell.”

She hoped she was right.

“The limpet is powering up,” Galileo said helpfully.

“Ted,” Elena began, “keep your—”

Before she could finish, all of the remaining drones turned in unison toward Galileo, and, like a flock of southbound birds, began flying with determined speed directly toward the ship’s midsection.

She swore and fired, Ted next to her doing the same thing, but there were too many of them. Galileo’s weapons caught drones, over and over: twelve, eleven, ten … but they were firing too slowly, and her mind’s eye saw Exeter: one second whole and intact, the next second flaming scrap. All those people dead, and here she was now with her own people, just the same …

… and the great, alien shape of Orunmila rose between Galileo and the oncoming raiders, so fast that fully five of them immolated themselves against her hull. Elena trusted the PSI ship’s pilot to do her job, and kept firing, her eyes flicking among the remaining raiders, watching them flame into nothing one by one.

“The limpet has detached,” Galileo said.

Four raiders.

Three …

Two …

One.

“Status of that ship!” she shouted.

“FTL field is powering up. Entrance in three seconds.”

It was too close. The risk of discharge against Exeter’s remaining power sources was huge. So much for no risk, she thought, furious with her mistake. They would not be in a position to take a solid shot anyway; if they caught the ship as the field was enfolding it, they might all get pulled to pieces.

Galileo spoke again. “Orunmila is targeting the raider.”

Blindly, Elena opened a channel to the PSI ship. “Orunmila, you can’t fire on that ship! Exeter’s generator battery is on that side, and the field—”

But it was too late.

Elena watched, helpless, her eyes leaving the tactical readout to look out the window. She saw the small bright projectile speed toward the escaping raider as the raider began to glow that familiar blue-white, the sharp edge of the developing field becoming defined around it. Maybe it would escape, and Orunmila’s shot would go wide, dispersing itself harmlessly into the vacuum.

I don’t think this is going to be that kind of a day.

The shot connected, and Elena held her breath … for nothing. The field folded cleanly around the Syndicate ship, and it vanished.

An unfamiliar voice came over Elena’s comm. “Galileo, this is Orunmila.” The woman’s voice was warm and melodic, her accent subtle, all soft consonants and low vowels. “We fired a tracker. Our apologies for alarming you.”

Suddenly Elena could breathe again. “Our apologies for doubting you,” she replied. “And thank you.”

“And you, Galileo.” The connection dropped, and it was only in the silence that Elena wondered if that musical-voiced woman had been Greg’s irritable Captain Shiang.

Elena flew Greg, Jessica, and three computational experts in a shuttle designed to carry four. Ordinarily Jessica would have made an acidic joke about the close quarters, but Elena’s usually irrepressible friend was silent, her normally sharp green eyes watching absently out the window as they approached Exeter’s carcass.

Which is what it is, Elena kept telling herself. Despite the oxygen and gravity still intact in pockets. Despite the fires still sputtering out from the shattered systems that still had a power source. A full third of the ship’s structure was gone; the rest of her could have been in perfect shape, and Central still would not have elected to repair her. Exeter was fifteen years old, near the end of her expected life span; but even a newer ship would have been decommissioned and listed as scrap. Despite their reliance on technology and science, the Corps was not without its institutionalized superstitions, and nobody would ever knowingly serve on a ship that had lost a battle like this one. Exeter, just that morning humming and perfect and home to four hundred people, was as dead as if there were nothing left of her at all.

Elena had been bitterly unhappy during her deployment on Exeter. Her escape to Galileo had felt like fleeing a prison. But she had friends who had stayed behind, had thrived, had loved the place as their home, just as she loved Galileo.

She fixed her eyes on the schematic of Exeter that the shuttle had superimposed over the front window, looking for an open docking conduit. She avoided the urge to look over at Greg. She knew he was worried about her, but he would never say anything in front of the others. He knew all about her experiences on Exeter—well, almost all—and he understood the curious attachment that came with one’s first deployment. He would know she was upset, too, know she wanted to run through the ship and find out how many of her friends had died. He would also know she would not indulge the wish, that she would do her duty to the best of her ability. And he would count on her to tell him if she couldn’t cope, even knowing what the admission would mean to her.

She was recognizing more and more often lately how well he knew her, despite all the ways he did not know her at all. A year ago, before she had learned she knew nothing of him at all, the thought would have been comforting.

Greg commed Commander Broadmoor shortly before they docked. “Where are we?” he said.

“We’ve got thirty-seven survivors so far,” the security chief told him. “No raiders yet. There are dead spaces between us and Control that we’ll need to physically bridge. And the core is silent, which means we’re stuck on external comms. The faster we can get past that, the easier it’ll be to sweep the ship. Do you have Lock—uh, Commander Lockwood with you? We could use her expertise.”

Up until seven months ago, Jessica had reported to Emily Broadmoor, and the security chief still sometimes forgot to address her with her new rank. Elena had been worried, in the beginning, that Emily would resent Jessica’s being promoted over her, but as it turned out Commander Broadmoor was pleased. “Amazing hacker,” she had confided to Elena, “but as a subordinate? What a pain in the ass.”

Elena docked the shuttle, and one by one they lowered themselves into what remained of the CCSS Exeter. The corridor was dark apart from the dim light coming from the shuttle, and she pulled a loop of emergency lights from her toolkit, pressing the glowing blue strip to the wall. Here the corridor was untouched, the wall and floors undamaged, the only evidence of injury the stillness and the dark. She could hear the hiss of the environmentals, but none of the mechanical hum of the engines. Which made sense, she realized belatedly: the engines were gone. The environmentals were likely running on batteries, and she struggled to remember how big a bank Exeter carried. “The systems won’t last more than twelve hours,” she told Greg, doing the math in her head. “We need to pull some emergency packs over from Galileo.”

He commed back to their ship as Emily came around the corner, a dozen infantry flanking her. She gave them a crisp salute, and turned immediately to Jessica. “Think you can get us talking, Commander?” she asked.

Elena and Greg left the technical people to their work and moved to the infantry. These were combat soldiers: broad, well-muscled, and well-armed, and Elena hoped they would be superfluous. Greg picked off half of them and put them under Elena’s command. “I need you to get down to engineering,” he told them, “or what’s left of it. Chief, see what you can find there, if there’s anything we can postmortem. And I want to know what that limpet left behind at the entry point. The quicker we can identify the tribe, the quicker we can shut the bastards down.” He met her eyes then, for the first time since they had been sitting in his office idly writing reports. Ten minutes ago? Five? “You stay on the line, Chief. Understand?” He didn’t wait for her answer, but turned to frown at the infantry. “All of you. Thirty seconds goes by without someone telling me what’s going on, I’m assuming an emergency situation and we go after you, weapons hot.”

Nods all around. Elena stepped into the group, feeling oddly slight despite being taller than four of them. She knew what worried Greg: Exeter had almost certainly been boarded. And without knowing why the raiders had come, they had to assume something—or someone—had been left behind.

CHAPTER 4
Exeter

Guanyin had never been on a Central ship before. Captain Çelik had offered once, when she was just twenty-one and in the early stages of her training with Chanyu. She had desperately wanted to go, but Chanyu had politely vetoed the idea, and Çelik had not asked again. Now, wandering Exeter’s dark, unfamiliar corridors, she wished she had pushed the point, had seen what this lifeless, colorless structure had looked like when it was functional. She might have been able to lead the mission without feeling like she was walking through a tomb.

She had eight of her security people with her, including Cali, who was following a resentful three steps behind. Cali had expended a fair amount of energy trying to convince Guanyin to stay behind, beginning with stating her value as the ship’s captain, and eventually resorting to referring to her pregnancy. But that was not what had made Guanyin shut her down. When the appeal to Guanyin’s maternal instincts had failed, Cali had gone for politics.

“You step on a Corps starship, you’re sending a message,” she had said, in front of the assembled landing team. “You’re implying alliance. Commitment. Never mind Captain Çelik—have you thought about what their command chain is going to think?”

This, she thought, is why you will never be anyone’s first officer, Cali. But even as the rational thought was running through her head, she lost her temper completely. “Who are you to tell me I should leave them to their own devices?” she had snapped. Aida’s head had come up when she said it, and she realized he had never really seen her temper before. A learning experience for him, then. “They are in trouble, and like any other ship in trouble we will help them. And we, Lieutenant, means me.”

Cali had backed down. She had, in fact, said nothing at all to Guanyin since then. Guanyin wanted to shake her for her silliness. Protectiveness was one thing, but Guanyin was the ship’s captain. If Cali had a problem with an order, the place to bring it up was not in front of the whole crew.

She had spoken briefly to Captain Foster before they arrived. All of his glib self-assurance was gone, replaced by a quiet levelheadedness that she liked much better. She had offered Aida’s help in getting Exeter’s internal comms systems linked into the external network, and Foster had accepted without qualification. They were headed toward the bow of the ship to deliver Aida to the comms center, dependent on the schematic Captain Foster had sent over, which he had told her would likely be out of date. That should not have surprised her—Orunmila was being constantly reconfigured; no map but their own dynamically generated schematic would be accurate more than a few weeks—but she had not, she realized, thought of Corps ships as similarly living, changing habitats.

They came around a corner, and Guanyin caught the sound of distant voices. Instantly she halted the group, and snuffed out the lights; for a moment the absolute darkness blinded her, and then she caught a weak glimmer of light far ahead. She turned her own light on, very low, and began creeping forward again; Cali, cured of her snit in the face of her duty, moved in front of her, hugging the wall as she crept forward on quiet feet. Guanyin gripped her handgun—a lethal but short-range model her arms officer had suggested as useful for avoiding unintended hull breaches—and strained to make out words.

She recognized first that they were speaking Standard. Not entirely a guarantee of safety, but most of the raiders she had run across spoke their own dialects, cobbled together from a half-dozen local languages or more, and communicated in Standard or PSI dialects roughly and with thick accents. On impulse, she commed Captain Foster. “Captain, do you have anyone aft of Control?”

“Not yet, Captain. We’ve got vacuum between here and there. What have you got?”

She was quiet again, listening. “Possible survivors, I believe. I will let you know.” She cut the comm, and nodded to Cali.

They all stopped, and Cali shouted, “Drop your weapons and stand down!”

A flurry of footsteps, the sound of weapons powering up, a series of shouts and murmurs. And then one voice, over the rest: “That’s a PSI dialect, you shitheads. Stand the fuck down.”

Guanyin placed the voice almost immediately. “It’s all right,” she told Cali and Aida. “They’re Exeter.” And striding in front of her friend, she rounded the corner.

There were eight of them, all standing on their own two feet, she noted with relief. Despite the stand-down order every one of them still had their hands on the bodies of long pulse rifles—no concerns about hull breaches here. As an afterthought she holstered her own weapon. None of them were in environmental suits, and instinctively she reached up and tugged her hood off. Instantly she was hit with the odor of burning electricals and ozone, combined with the pungent odor of human sweat. Just like home, she thought, and approached the tall man at the head of the group.

“Commander Keita, I believe,” she said, and held out her hand. “I am Captain Shiang Guanyin, of Orunmila.”

She did not think he would remember her. She had met him briefly, two years ago, shortly after he had been promoted, during one of the supply missions they had performed with Exeter. He looked older than she remembered, but otherwise she was struck by the same things: his wide, thick-necked build that made him seem even taller than he was, the chiseled, almost cruel handsomeness of his square, dark-skinned face, the strange softness of his brown eyes that made her think of an artist more than a soldier. She recalled his smile, which had moderated his features considerably; he had been quick-witted, she remembered, friendly and professional in a way that had put even Chanyu at ease. She had liked him immediately, and she felt an unexpected wave of relief at seeing his face.

He took her hand, and a shadowy version of that smile passed over his lips. “Good to see you, Captain. And thank you for stepping into the battle when you did. Without you, we’d have been dust before Galileo arrived.”

“I am grateful we were close,” she said sincerely. Beside her, Cali was radiating disapproval. “This is Lieutenant Annenkov, in charge of my security, and Mr. Aida, my comms officer. We are trying to rendezvous with Captain Foster in the bow of the ship.” She cast her eye over the rubble beyond his people. “It might be faster for us to go back to the shuttle and fly to the other side.”

Keita’s lips tightened, making him look grim again. “Captain Çelik is on the other side of that,” he explained. “He was heading from Control down to engineering—or what’s left of it—to find out what the fuck was going on with our guns, and we took a hit.”

All of her relief vanished. “What do you need?”

“Beyond shifting all this debris? Structural support, I think,” he said. “There’s no vacuum on the other side, but this whole section got hit hard. We can’t be sure we won’t be pulling the whole ceiling down by digging out.”

She could send back for some of her structural engineers, but the thought of the time it would take for them to fly over twisted the knot in her stomach. She commed Captain Foster again. “We have survivors,” she told him.

She heard him exhale sharply. “How many?”

“Eight. Commander Keita is here. And … they tell me they believe Captain Çelik is behind this debris. Do you have any structural people with you? I suspect there is some urgency here.”

“I’m going to connect my engineer,” he told her; and then a moment later: “Chief? Where are you?”

A woman’s voice, as calm and self-assured as his, responded. “We’re about a hundred meters from Control. We haven’t found anyone so far.”

“Captain Shiang is down there, with some of Exeter’s people. They’re trying to dig Captain Çelik out of some wreckage. Can you evaluate the structural situation?”

But the woman didn’t answer his question. “Who’s down there?” she asked, considerably less calm.

Guanyin opened her mouth to answer, but Commander Keita spoke first. “Songbird? Is that you?”

“Dee?” The woman sounded relieved. “My God, Dee. Are you all right?”

“I’ve got a fucking pulse, at least. Get your ass down here and help us dig the captain out.”

“Right.” The businesslike tone was back. “Thirty seconds.”

“Captain,” Guanyin put in, “I suspect there will be more need for structural evaluations. Exeter took a great many hits.”

“Agreed.” There was a hint of weariness in his voice now, as if his chief’s urgency had drained him somehow. “Can we pick up the pace on the security sweep?”

“I have another hundred people I can bring over,” she told him. “We should be able to clear the ship in thirty minutes.” Faster if you’d let him show me all those years ago, Guanyin thought bitterly at Chanyu. She could have cleared Orunmila in ten minutes, she knew the corridors so well.

“I can send a medic your way as well,” Foster offered.

It was on the tip of her tongue to refuse him. “I think that would be wise,” she agreed. “I will also bring in a team from Orunmila. Captain Çelik will not, I think, be the last casualty we find.”

As Cali commed back to Orunmila, relaying her instructions, Galileo’s people rounded the corner.

There were seven of them, all armed and armored, led by a striking woman with dark hair, as tall as Guanyin was herself. In an instant of incongruous shock, Guanyin recognized her, and she realized she should have guessed the moment Captain Foster said Chief.

When she had finally thought to search the mainstream news outlets for information on Greg Foster, she had been surprised to find he had been part of what had happened in the Fifth Sector last year. The face of Central’s involvement had been this woman’s: Commander Elena Shaw, a mechanic who had laid her life on the line for love of a retired PSI captain. Which was the popular myth, of course; Guanyin, who had little sentiment around love, suspected the reality of it was both more mundane and more complex. She had seen a brief, much-reproduced vid of Commander Shaw shouting at some police officers, and while the woman had seemed passionate in her pursuit of justice, she had not seemed much like a romantic hero. Foster was much more the stereotype; but his was not the name that had ended up in the spotlight.

Here, her face lit by the cold portable lights, Commander Shaw looked even less the hero: she looked haggard and tired, and her worried expression seemed etched into the lines of her face. But as Guanyin watched, the woman’s eyes hit Commander Keita, and her whole demeanor unwound in relief. Oblivious to Guanyin and her people, Shaw shoved her pulse rifle back over her shoulder and flung her arms around Keita. He embraced her in return, and Guanyin saw his eyes squeeze tightly shut. Shaw whispered something unintelligible, and for an instant, Keita’s lips widened into something almost like a smile.

Then she pulled away and turned to Guanyin, her expression once again professional. “Captain Shiang?”

Guanyin straightened. “Yes. Commander Shaw, I believe.”

Something passed across Commander Shaw’s face—chagrin, Guanyin thought, at being recognized. And then her gaze dropped, just for an instant, to Guanyin’s midsection. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but Guanyin thought she blushed.

They don’t have children on their ships, Chanyu had told her years ago, his voice disapproving. They are superstitious. Guanyin had not believed him.

Whatever the reasons for her reaction, Shaw regrouped quickly enough. She held out a hand, aware enough of PSI etiquette not to salute, and Guanyin took it. “We can start shifting anything that’s loose,” she said, her eyes scanning the wall. “Anything resists, leave it alone for now. Give me a few minutes to analyze the structural damage.”

Guanyin left her comm open, then pulled off her gloves, heading for the pile of debris. Behind her, she heard the slither of fabric as Cali and Aida pulled off their hoods and gloves. Cali was moving hesitantly—wary of Guanyin’s trusting nature, she suspected; Cali had always had a much larger dose of Chanyu’s skepticism—but Aida gamely stripped off his protective gear and lent his shoulder to the group. All the Corps soldiers were twice as wide as he was, but they moved aside and included him without comment. Guanyin moved in next to him, and she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Cali against the opposite wall, reaching for a collapsed beam along with Keita. Guanyin started at the bottom, shifting smaller pieces, while Commander Shaw ran a scanner along the ceiling.

They worked steadily in silence for what must have been a quarter of an hour, and then Commander Shaw took a step back. “Stay to the right,” she said. “Greg? Can you add some gravity units to the supply list? Once we’re clear we’re going to want to shut off Exeter’s gravity and work localized. There’s more structural damage here than we thought.”

The group shifted to one side, and Guanyin began pulling at larger pieces of debris. At one point she found a solid length of steel that, with Aida’s help, she was able to slide through the gap. Commander Shaw joined her on the other side, and the three of them levered a massive section of shattered bulkhead out of the way, revealing a meter-wide passage through the wreckage. Aiming her light, Guanyin stared anxiously into the opening beyond.

The gap opened onto the ruins of what had once been a large room, sparsely furnished. The interior walls had fallen in on themselves, table and chairs tossed around the room, in pieces on the floor.

And in one corner, against the wall, half under a massive tangle of sheet metal and electronic equipment, lay a very still Captain Raman Çelik.

Oblivious to the others, Guanyin stepped inside. She heard Commander Shaw’s light step behind her as she crouched down next to Çelik’s prone form. Focusing her light on him, she could see he was breathing, although his chest rose and fell too quickly, and she took a shaky breath. His appearance was appalling. His usually copper-warm skin had an undertone of gray, as if he had been rubbed with ash, and his right leg, trapped beneath the remains of a wall, was buried almost to his hip. There was a dark spot on his forehead, a mix of blood and bruise. “Xiao,” she snapped into her comm, “where are you?”

“Two minutes out, Captain,” Xiao said smoothly.

“Our doctor is on his way as well,” Foster said in her ear. “He’s alive?”

“He is.” Guanyin heard Shaw whisper to the others, and they began to clear the debris away from the opening, careful not to disturb the wreckage pinning Çelik down. He began to stir, and Guanyin thought if he could be roused, perhaps his head injury was not as bad as it looked. His eyes still closed, he moved his head, and his eyebrows twitched together. Pain, no doubt. She wondered how much he could feel of what was trapped under wreckage. She wondered how much he remembered of what had happened.

Guanyin crouched down, bringing her face level with his. “Captain Çelik,” she said, keeping her tone measured and formal. “Sir, you must wake up.”

Çelik coughed, then cleared his throat. He winced, eyes still closed; his senses were coming back. Out of the corner of her eye, Guanyin saw a pair of legs appear, and then Commander Shaw crouched down next to her.

“Captain,” Shaw said, her voice firm and sharp.

He opened his eyes. For a moment he looked at Shaw, unfocused, expression troubled and confused. Then he blinked, just once, and his eyes locked on Guanyin; and to her astonishment, he began to laugh.

“Well, fuck me,” he said, his voice rough and damaged. “I’ve been rescued by the child prodigy.”

Beside her, she felt Commander Shaw stiffen; but the relief she felt at the gibe was so intense she almost laughed herself. She fought to keep her expression neutral. “Do you know where you are, Captain?” she asked him.

He frowned irritably. “I’m in what’s left of Control,” he told her, “on my ship, the CCSS Exeter, which some execrable bastards who will soon be dying a slow and painful death have blown to pieces. I am forty-six years old, my mother’s name is Nadide, and you have five fingers on your left hand. Are you satisfied?”

“For the moment.” That was worrying; she would not have expected him to lose composure in front of her.

He blinked again, his eyes back on Shaw. “I know you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Shaw’s voice was so composed it might have come from a computer.

“You worked for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Didn’t they throw you out?”

“Not yet, sir.” There was no mistaking the hint of annoyance in her voice; but Çelik looked satisfied.

He looked past Shaw to take in the rest of the group. “Keita,” he said to his second-in-command, “what’s our status?”

“We’re still doing recon, sir,” Keita said. “Twenty-six enemy ships destroyed, one escaped, but Captain Shiang hit it with a tracker before it entered the field.”

Çelik’s eyes, all their sharp intelligence intact, snapped back to hers. “Can we follow them?”

She shook her head. “It is not an in-field tracker. We must wait until they emerge.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then our mission is complete, Captain.”

He looked discontented at that. “I’d get up and scan for the damn thing myself,” he growled, “but I seem to be immobilized. Any reason you pack of geniuses are standing there staring at me like I’m a garden gnome?”

Under other circumstances, she would have asked him what a garden gnome was. “We are waiting for Doctor Xiao,” she told him.

“Ah.” No gibes for Xiao, at least. His eyes stole away from hers, returning to Keita. “How many dead?”

“Internal comms are down, sir. We can’t be sure. We can’t even bring up the duty rosters to validate who was on duty down there.”

“Who’s on that?”

“Galileo has sent their comms people,” Keita told him.

“How many do we usually have on duty in the engine room?”

Keita paused. “Eighty-four, sir.”

Guanyin did not think any of the others were close enough to hear the hiss of the quick breath Çelik sucked in between his teeth. He turned his attention back to Shaw. “You’re still a mechanic, as I recall,” he said to her. “Tell me: Is this a rescue mission, or is it salvage?”

Guanyin wondered if the woman would lie to him. “Salvage, sir,” she said at last. “In my opinion.”

The last Guanyin recognized as a kindness. She thought Çelik would recognize it as such. He ignored the words, and turned back to Guanyin. “Captain, how many of your people have you got on board?”

“We have brought forty so far,” she told him. “Captain Foster has a similar number, I believe. I am bringing another hundred to clear the ship, and more when we are certain the raiders are gone.”

At that, his eyes went dark and tired, and for the first time in the ten years she had known him, Guanyin thought he looked old. “You won’t find anyone,” he said. “They got what they came for.”

Xiao came in then, quick and businesslike as if she were walking into her own infirmary, and stepped up next to Guanyin. She clucked down at Çelik. “You should have stayed away from the walls,” she told him, pulling out her medical kit.

“I’ll remember that next time,” he replied dryly. “What’s under that mess?”

Xiao frowned at the readout. “Your right leg is severed mid-calf,” she said, as if she was explaining an insect bite, “and your femur has a hairline fracture. You might do better to have it taken off at the hip. It would make for a cleaner joint when they grow you a graft.”

Guanyin felt her gut turn over, and she laid a hand instinctively on her round stomach. She had always found Xiao somewhat tastelessly matter-of-fact about these things, but under the circumstances she thought Çelik might appreciate the bluntness. Indeed, a grin stretched across his gray features. “For now,” he told Xiao, “I’d just as soon you leave me what parts are still attached.”

Xiao heaved a sigh; he was making her life more difficult. She turned to Guanyin, and switched out of Standard. “We’ll have to remove the debris quickly so I can cauterize the wound,” she said. “He may bleed out if I don’t. He might if I do, but it’s our only option. And he’s likely to pass out either way; the pain will be dreadful, even for a man like him. We’ll need to immobilize him.”

“Perhaps,” Çelik put in, speaking Standard, “one of these brave souls could prop me up.”

Guanyin had forgotten he could understand them. She took a step toward him, but next to her, Shaw spoke. “I’ll do it, Captain,” she said. Guanyin gave her a sharp look, and Commander Shaw must have guessed what she was thinking, because she softened her expression. “I outweigh you by a bit, I think,” she added. Guanyin nodded, willing herself to take a step back and trust that others could look after him as well as she could.

They cleared as much of the debris as they could without removing the lifesaving pressure from his wound, and then, at Xiao’s nod, Commander Shaw sat on the floor next to Captain Çelik, her back to him, bracing her feet against the wall. “On three,” Xiao said in dialect. “One—”

“Wait,” Guanyin said. She met Shaw’s eyes; it was clear the woman didn’t understand Xiao’s numbers. “I will count.”

She counted down in Standard, and when she finished, Keita—along with Cali, Aida, and the rest of the soldiers—heaved the remaining chunk of metal off of Çelik’s trapped leg. The captain made a brief, strangled sound through clenched teeth and then fell silent. Guanyin forced herself to look at his face rather than Xiao’s frantic ministrations. He was still gray, and with his eyes closed and his face slack he looked disturbingly vulnerable; but she could see him breathing, his chest rising and falling in shallow gasps. She caught herself breathing with him, and dug her fingernails into her palms, steadying herself. Xiao was a professional, and Çelik was strong, and she would have no more deaths today, thank you very much.

After interminable minutes, Xiao sat back. “That will hold,” she said, to Guanyin’s look. “The break was fairly clean, and he was burned as well. Without that, he would have bled out, even with the bulkhead cutting off his circulation.” She frowned at Çelik’s face. “His pressure is still lower than I’d like, but he’s better off unconscious right now. We should transport him.”

Guanyin nodded, and Xiao commed her team and began packing up her kit. Out of the corner of her eye, Guanyin saw Shaw looking from Xiao to Çelik and back again; but it was Captain Foster, listening in on the exchange, who spoke in her ear. “With respect, Captain, he should be transferred to Galileo.”

Guanyin had been expecting this objection. “Do you worry our medical team is inadequate?” she said icily. “Or do you believe we will harm him?”

She braced herself for more of Captain Foster’s paternalistic rubbish; but his tone stayed steadily professional, and she thought he had anticipated her objection as well. “He’ll want to be with his wounded people, Captain. And most of them will prefer the familiarity of another Corps starship.”

Damn. He’s right. Guanyin had been thinking about Çelik as an individual, not as a starship captain. That, and her own selfish worries. Chanyu’s voice echoed in her ear: It is how you make apologies that will show what sort of commander you are. “You are quite right, Captain Foster. Would you object to Doctor Xiao accompanying him?”

Guanyin caught something flicker through Shaw’s dark eyes; relief, perhaps. “No objection at all,” Captain Foster said. “And if she’s willing to stay and help, I’m sure our chief medical officer would be grateful for the extra hands.”

Galileo medics arrived, and to their credit they did not blink even once at the mixed crew tending Captain Çelik. Xiao spoke with them, and a few minutes later they carried Çelik, still unconscious, down the corridor on an anti-grav stretcher. Guanyin had to fight the urge to go with them. Perhaps she would find an excuse to visit later; she still had to ask what it was the raiders had taken away.

And she did not think she would feel easy until she heard him snipe at her again.

CHAPTER 5

C aptain Shiang is pregnant.

The corridors leading to the gap that had been the engineering section were largely intact, and Elena and her team were able to move quickly. She unrolled light strips methodically onto the walls as they progressed, all of her movements on autopilot. Such an odd thing to fixate on, the PSI captain’s round stomach; but with everything she had seen since the battle, that had been the most unexpected.

She felt herself growing angry with Greg. He should have known this; he should have warned her. But of course he would have no idea why such a thing would bother her, and it wasn’t like she was prepared to discuss it with him now. Too much had changed between them, and she was still too uncertain of what they had become. She might never find the right time to tell him.

Only once before had she seen a pregnant woman on a starship, and she hadn’t known it at the time. For those five days she had looked in the mirror each morning and noticed nothing different. Not until the pregnancy was lost and over had she known it had existed at all.

Stress, she told herself. This is all distraction. Set it aside, deal with it later. Remember why you’re here.

The damage to Exeter’s engineering section had been relatively contained, the ship’s modular structure keeping the adjacent corridors almost completely undamaged. They came across one section where the wall had gone missing, exposing the corridor to space; the ship’s environmental system had managed to extend oxygen over the breach, although not gravity. Elena let Darrow, the platoon leader, leap over first. The soldier then extended her arm and pulled the others over, one by one, with Elena last.

She wondered if, under ordinary lights and populated by a working crew, she would find the halls familiar. She had spent a year of her life here, the turns and levels becoming second nature. But after almost eight years away, she found most of her memories were emotional: her hideous naiveté when she arrived, so certain that she had found her path, that she would serve out her career on board this ship; her realization that the hazing and the insults and the subtle acts of subversion were not an initiation, that Captain Çelik preferred his people insecure and off-balance. Less than six months into her first, coveted deployment, she had begun to search for a way off the ship.

And then Canberra had happened, and all her priorities had changed.

They walked the perimeter of the wreckage, alert for intruders; but all they found were more of Exeter’s crew. They stumbled on nearly three dozen of them, mostly techs and medical staff, holed up in an interior space, shivering in the dark and awaiting news. Greg promised to send a team for them, but Elena traded one of her infantry for a medic and left them behind with some of her temporary lights. Purely psychological, leaving them with one soldier; but in their place, she thought she would want the reminder that they were not in danger anymore. And she was hoping she would need the medic with her team.

But the others they found were beyond help.

They came across a group of six who had all been burned, a quick, white-hot flash leaving them unrecognizable. Elena wanted to scan them herself, wanting to know if she recognized a name; but she realized, as Exeter’s medic knelt before them, that they were not her dead. She watched as he slipped a gloved hand behind their burn-contorted necks to scan their ident chips. There was nothing in the charred flesh, in the holes where the eyes had evaporated, that the medic could have recognized.

“We’ll collect them,” he asked her, rising to his feet, “won’t we?”

He was a little shorter than she was, and roughly the same age. She wondered if her eyes, like his, looked centuries old.

“All of them,” she told him. He nodded, and they moved on.

The limpet had left a shuttle-sized hole in the wall of the corridor. Exeter’s automated system had done a good job of sealing out the vacuum, but managing a space that size would drain the batteries far too quickly. “Captain,” she said, “we’re going to want generators. A lot of them. It’s going to take some time to seal this.” Regardless of what she had told Çelik, she wasn’t ready yet to give the ship up as lost.

There was a pause on the comm, and she tensed. “Shimada is pulling some equipment together,” he said. “I’ll have him add generators to the list.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Not on an open comm, Commander.”

Her first response was annoyance—why does he always pull rank when I ask something important?—and then she realized what he was saying: he had received confirmation from the Admiralty. They would not be sealing the breach. Her list of damaged equipment would be listed as salvage, and Exeter would be scrapped. It would have been obvious to anyone who was thinking clearly, but now was not the time to say it out loud.

“Exeter can hold the vacuum out for a few hours yet,” she told him. Without waiting for him to give the order, she turned to Darrow. “I’m heading out. Sweep this area, and get any survivors behind the central bulkhead. Once we’re sure it’s clear, we can expose this section.”

If Darrow had put together the implications, she kept her reaction to herself. She nodded to Elena, and led the rest of the infantry down the hall toward the brig.

Elena checked the seals of her environmental suit, and stepped forward to the blown-out hole. She could see vestiges of quick-drying foam sealant around the torn metal edges of the opening. It would have been easy enough to modify a standard consumer-model shuttle to secrete foam on impact; it would be a simple inversion of a land-model safety feature. Easy enough—low-tech, even—to make the shuttle a missile to punch through an exposed interior wall and create an airtight seal.

Somewhat less refined than the fleet of advanced fighter drones, but much more in keeping with the inept piloting of the drone that had hit the ship.

She attached her tether to the interior wall and stepped through the hole, feeling a familiar lurch as she shifted out of the gravity field, and a strange sense of claustrophobia as her suit’s interior began generating its own heat. Keeping one hand on the edge of the blown-out opening, she looked up and down the ship’s exterior.

From a distance, she had seen Exeter’s build structure, all arched ribs and level separators at right angles. Up close it was chaos: scrap metal, polymers, and fiber, burned and torn as if some massive animal had pulled it apart in a rage. She reached out and tugged at a line; it came loose, and when she pinched it between her fingers it turned to dust.

Too much heat, she thought. “This is more than just a short-range generator explosion,” she told Greg.

“Can you identify it?”

She pushed off along the hull toward another cluster of fiber. “I expect so. Standard incendiaries will leave residue.” She took a handful of lines in her fist and tugged experimentally; these were less decayed. She pulled more steadily, and they came away from the hull. “If the drone had some kind of hybrid battery—son of a bitch!”

Reflexively she released her clutch of fibers and pushed away from the hull. What she had pulled away from the interior was a body, bloated and unrecognizable, its exterior covered in a thin sheen of ice. Regrouping, she tugged on her tether and brought herself closer to it, closing her hand around its arm to keep it from drifting free.

“Chief?” She became aware that Greg had been calling her name repeatedly.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, as steadily as she could. “I believe I’ve run across one of the enemy.”

Up close she could make out more details. The clothing it was wearing was dark brown, thick and sturdy cloth, but nothing like an environmental suit. Not a Corps uniform, which meant it was one of the raiders. Some kind of infiltrator caught in the blast? Piloting one of the ships she had thought was a drone? She tugged him forward, examining the alcove she had pulled him out of. She could see nests of fibers and polymer sheets moved to one side. The body had been shoved there after the blast. And from the look of the remains … he had been alive when he had been exposed to the vacuum.

She hooked her arm through his rigid elbow and pulled on her tether, hauling herself back through the opening. The abrupt gravity yanked the body from her grip, and she caught at him, unable to prevent him from dropping, stiff and undignified, to the floor. She stepped over him, leaning against the wall.

“I’m not a medic, but it sure looks like death by decompression,” she told Greg. “If he hasn’t got an ident chip, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting a name.”

“Don’t go back out there alone, Chief,” he said. “That’s an order.”

An emotional one, she thought, then looked down at the corpse. Inhuman, at this stage, distorted and hideous.

Murderer.

“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged. She was far too close to all of this, and Greg knew it, too.

“Chief?” Darrow said. “You inside?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Aft. By the brig. We found two more bodies, ma’am, one raider, and one of Exeter’s people, but we’ve got one alive. One of ours. Looks like he was guarding the brig, but it’s been blasted open.”

She began heading down the hallway. “Had it been inhabited?”

“Hard to tell, and the officer isn’t talking yet.”

She rounded the corner, and came across the raider first. Despite being free of the ravages of the vacuum, he was, in his brown uniform, as nondescript as the other one. She put his age at something between thirty and forty, but his slack skin was already sinking into his cheekbones. He could have been much younger. His features were neutral to the point of blandness: regular, symmetrical, echoes of a dozen different ethnicities easily projected onto his bone structure. She wondered if he’d had himself altered to be ordinary, or if his ability to blend in had led him to a life of theft and rootlessness.

No way to ask him now.

He had taken a shot directly in the sternum, and his chest had collapsed with the impact. She wondered if it had been a quick death, if he had blacked out and felt no pain. She hoped not.

She stepped over him to the other body, sprawled out on the deck, staring sightlessly upward, her unlined face forever stilled. Young. Maybe new. Maybe not even out here a year. This was not what she would have hoped for when she chose her deployment, the ship on which she would live her entire life.

Beyond her, Elena saw Darrow and the medic crouched before another soldier, slumped against the wall. Elena knelt down with the others. He was a sturdily built man around her own age, breathing but unconscious; the medic was administering something with a dermal patch.

The man shifted and his eyelids fluttered, and she felt her heart thumping against her chest. She took a quick look at his uniform. “Lieutenant. Can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me.”

A small sound pushed its way through his lips. If the ship had not been so cavernously silent, she would not have heard him.

“Come on,” she entreated. Cautiously she extended a hand and touched his arm; he shifted again.

“… sorry …” he murmured. His eyes opened, staring at nothing.

“Lieutenant, do you know where you are?”

“Sydney,” he said. His unfocused gaze had wandered to the dead woman.

“Is that her name?”

He swallowed. “Dead now.”

“I know, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

He did not respond, just kept his eyes focused over her shoulder. “Sorry,” he said again; and as she watched, his eyes grew damp.

She rubbed his arm, helpless. “Just hang on. Help is coming.”

He shook his head. “No help.”

We came as fast as we could, she thought; but that was her excuse, and it gave him nothing. She kept her hand on his arm, hoping the contact would give him something to focus on, a reason to fight back.

“Who is it?”

Greg’s voice in her ear, normal and familiar. The medic responded. “Lieutenant Farias,” he said. “He took plasma fire. I think it was either him or Sydney who took out the raider.”

“Ask him if the raider was the one in the brig,” Greg said.

The medic gave Elena a look, but shifted to one side so she could question the injured man. “Lieutenant Farias, were you and Sydney on duty? Was there a raider in your brig?”

But he had started closing his eyes again, and she could not be sure he had understood her. “No help,” he said again. “I’m sorry, Sydney.” And he fell unconscious once more.

Elena stood and moved away, letting the medic tend to him. She could not see where he had been shot, and she wondered instead if he had been beaten, if he had taken a blow to the head. “Did you get that?” she asked Greg.

“Not much to get,” he observed. “Will he live?”

Elena, who had not had the heart for such bluntness, looked at the medic, who nodded. “Can’t say for sure,” he equivocated aloud. “The concussion is pretty bad, but he’s got no fractures. As long as he doesn’t fall into a coma, he should recover in a few days.”

“Not sooner?” Greg asked.

The medic’s lips thinned with disapproval. “You want guarantees, Captain, you won’t get them from me,” he said shortly.

Greg was silent for a moment. “Chief, on a private line, please.” When she changed over, he said, “Are you okay there?”

She knew what he meant. “I’m better off here than home chewing on it,” she replied. “I want to get through this debris, and bring home some evidence.”

It was Greg’s turn to be silent, and she could see his face in her mind, knowing something was going on with her, uncertain of what he should do about it. Kindness. So often kindness from him, these days. She wished she could trust it.

In the end, he let it go. “All right, Chief,” he told her. “Carry on.”

She waited until they came to carry the injured lieutenant away, and then she reattached her tether and went back outside alone.

CHAPTER 6

Ted,” Jessica asked, “are you afraid of the dark?”

She was kneeling on the floor, running her magnetic scanner over Exeter’s data core, looking for echoes of information. The explosion that had taken out three levels and the entire engine room had sent a shock of heat and current through the system that had effectively shut it down, leaving nothing but the ship’s autonomic functions in place. There was no dynamic data scanning, no seeking, no sorting; she had to read the raw data off the core and feed it to Galileo for analysis. Next to her, Emily Broadmoor, her old boss and a damn good hacker in her own right, had nearly finished patching through the base comm system, so at least Exeter’s internal messaging system would work, after a fashion. With the ship’s brain offline, though, routing would be crude, there would be no records of anything, and the crew would have to route through Galileo for any kind of external services. Stone Age tech.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Ted’s voice said in her ear.

She was transferring the echoes to Ted on Galileo, who was matching them up with Exeter’s last known data dump. With some luck, he would be able to help her pinpoint the weapons data, to see if there had been a malfunction. Greg had been talking about it as a given, but it would be a double-edged sword if she found something. Evidence of malfunction would exonerate deceased gunners; but it would open up an avenue none of them wanted to have to explore.

“That’s bullshit,” she retorted. She frowned at her scanner and slowed it down; the information was patchy here, and she did not want to miss any. God, this job is going to take days. “You’re afraid of the captain.”

“A healthy respect for authority isn’t fear. That bit there, Jess—stop for a second.”

She sat while he waited for Galileo to chew on the data. “I was always afraid of the dark,” she confessed.

“You picked the wrong career,” he said. “Okay, keep going.”

“What was that?”

“Battery information, about three days old. We’re getting closer.”

Gently she nudged the scanner forward. “We’d get these long winter nights at home,” she went on. “Dark twice as long as it was light. When I was little, I figured if someone got sick in the daytime, they might live; but if they got sick at night, they’d never recover.”

“Have you ever considered therapy, Jess?”

“If you looked at the statistics,” she reasoned, “more people got sick at night just because the nights were longer, so more of them died. The correlation was meaningless, of course; but I was a kid.”

He paused, catching on. “You still superstitious?”

“I want,” she told him, carefully teasing apart a particularly dense chunk of information, “to be back home in my room with the lights on, getting very drunk with someone lovely and very, very alive.” She sat back, rubbing her eyes. “You should see this place, Ted. It’s a crypt.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Nearly a hundred dead, at least. How else can you look at it?”

“Like the ones who survived were pretty damn lucky. What do you think would have happened if that PSI ship had been further out?”

She thought back to the battle, watching the schematic at Greg’s side, hoping he could not see her shaking. He had appeared level and composed through the whole thing. She wondered if that was something that could be learned, or if he just went cold in a crisis—if that was something unique to him. Jessica never went cold in a crisis. “I don’t ever want to be captain, Ted,” she said.

Ted was apparently accustomed to her random changes of subject. “Given how bad he is at staying out of trouble, you may have a problem.”

“That was only once.”

“And you had to save his ass. And then he promoted you.”

“He’s a bastard.”

“You’re the one who works with him all day; you’d know better than I would.” He made a sound. “That’s it, Jess. Weapons systems. Get me everything you can preserve, as dense as you can get it.”

She spent the next half hour sorting through the magnetic shadows and memory imprints of the blocks Ted specified. She did not even have to lay it all out sequentially to see the pattern: the excision of information, the lobotomizing of the weapons systems’ connection to the ship’s larger mind. And at the end of it, fragments of something else: a personal bio key, obscuring a shattered block of indecipherable commands Exeter had not survived to execute.

This was careful damage, done with thought, entirely different from the randomized destruction of heat and pulse waves. And it had been done much earlier.

“What do you think, Ted?” she asked. “Sixteen hours?”

“No more than seventeen, for sure,” he replied. “Didn’t their flight plan have them in the field seventeen hours ago?”

Despite its size, Exeter’s massive stellar batteries ensured it could travel for long stretches in the field. Elena had told her once, but Jessica could not remember. “What’s she rated for?” she asked Ted.

“Nineteen hours, but she’s done twenty-one without turning a hair,” he recalled. “Shit, Jess.”

Ted was not one to curse, but this time she was not surprised. The implication was clear to her as well. “Had to be someone on board.”

“What about a delayed payload? Could someone have coded something like this?”

She frowned at the system. “Possibly,” she allowed. “I’ll have to take a closer look. But I don’t think so, Ted. The timing would have had to be just right, or someone would have discovered it as part of a maintenance run or a drill. You don’t just hack a payload into a Central starship. It’d be hard even for me.”

He was quiet for a moment. “But someone did. And people died, Jess. Someone did this, and did it on purpose. Someone they knew.”

She thought back over her career, over her schooling, over her early life on a planet where fully half of the children she knew had died before the age of fourteen. “Knowing someone,” she told him, “doesn’t mean they won’t fuck you over.”

Greg asked the same question Ted had. “How much skill would it take to seed something like this to execute later?”

She was leaning against the wall, eyes closed, head aching from staring at small pieces of data for hours. Emily had brought the emergency lights online, and they had given Jessica some energy, but they could not erase eye strain. “Given enough prep time,” she said, “I might be able to code something, although I don’t think I’d bet my life—let alone my career—on the thing working. The Admiralty might have someone, though.” She thought of Shadow Ops, but did not bother reminding him of the skillsets present in that organization.

He knew more of those details than she did.

“How hard would it be for someone to do it in person?”

“Not hard. They’d need command codes and a little knowledge of weapons systems, but that’s it.”

He paused, and she imagined him rubbing his eyes. He is going to be very nearsighted someday. “Have you got enough left to find out whose command code was used?”

At last, an easy answer—but not one she wanted to give him. “No, sir. All the analytical memory is gone. Volatile storage doesn’t even have echoes left. I found a partial bio key that was probably intended to wipe the evidence after the fact, but there’s not enough to attempt a match.” She fought a wave of depression. “We can’t find out, sir. The information is just not there.”

Another pause, then: “Okay.” He had regrouped, just in those few seconds. “I want you back on Galileo. Get in touch with the Admiralty—Herrod, if you can get him, but otherwise anyone but Waris—and get this area quarantined. We’ll need another ship for the wounded, but I want it clear this is a crime scene. Get him to agree to that.”

“You think he will?”

“If he doesn’t,” Greg said grimly, “that tells us something right there. After you’ve talked to him, get a crew over here to finish the core analysis.”

She felt a bubble of indignation. “Sir—” she began.

“Jessica.” His voice was gentle, the way it got when he was about to tell her she was an idiot. “Is this job so delicate that you’re the only one who can do it?”

“Are you telling me I’m replaceable?”

“I’m telling you you’re the second-in-command, and you need to delegate, because you’re not at all replaceable and right now I need you. Pick some people you trust, and get them on the job.”

“I don’t trust anyone.” That wasn’t precisely true. Emily had some damn good crypto people. None as good as Jessica was, but hadn’t she just been thinking that what this job needed most was patience? “It feels wrong, sir,” she confessed, “passing this off on someone else.”

“I know.” And that, of course, was the worst part: he did. “But right now that’s your duty, Commander. We have good people. Trust them to do their jobs.”

Within a few minutes, she was able to find a space on a shuttle back to Galileo, and she sat in silence next to a half dozen of Exeter’s crew, all with minor abrasions, all somber and still. None of them seemed inclined to look at her, and she felt that strange indignation again. Who am I to be heading home, to my bright room and my well-lit corridors and all the people I love? Why do I deserve that peace, when these people have lost everything in the space of a few minutes? Because they had to know they would never be going back to Exeter. She wondered if they would have the chance to retrieve their possessions, and she resolved, if she had the power, to make sure they were given the time.

She wanted to talk to Elena. Elena always let her rant, and never tried to slow her down or tell her she was being silly. Elena was one of a very few people who had ever seen her cry. But Elena would be handling her own raft of shit right now—or, rather, avoiding it. She was just like Greg that way: she went stony, handling what was in front of her, all emotion shoved aside. But unlike Greg, the emotion eventually caught up with her, and she would flame out in a burst of grief and rage, days, sometimes weeks later.

Greg swallowed everything. Elena held on until she flew apart. As much as Jessica admired them both, neither was teaching a lesson she wanted to learn.

CHAPTER 7
Galileo

Nearly seven hours later, Elena finally flew home.

It had occurred to her, during the fifth hour she was floating outside going over the burned-out remains of Exeter’s decking, that she ought to pass the task off to someone else. Someone uninvolved, who had not been awake for twenty-five hours. But there was something in her that wanted the worst of it laid out starkly before her, so she could get on with the anger and grief and move beyond it. She hoped if she stared point-blank at the horror long enough, she could jolt her way past the leaden numbness in her stomach.

Everyone on the shuttle with her was ambulatory, the worst of the casualties having been moved hours earlier, and once she landed she left them to disembark on their own. She had it in her mind to head for her room and a long hot shower, but the halls were full of strangers. Exeter’s crew. Based on the crowds, possibly all of them. Cassia was still hours off, and she suspected her room, along with most of the rooms on Galileo, had been commandeered to be used as temporary quarters.

Nowhere to be alone, then. Of course, given her mood, perhaps that wasn’t so bad.

The pub was both overcrowded and more subdued than she was used to seeing it. All the tables were filled, and soldiers stood in groups, drinks in hand, some talking in low voices, others just looking around or staring down at their feet. The pub’s wide windows faced into the stars, the view uninterrupted by planets, space stations, or other ships. Greg would have done that deliberately: positioned them so the most popular common space on the ship would not be overlooking the wreck. He was always so careful about such things. How many hours since she had spoken to him? She could not remember. She could not remember much of the day, now that she was thinking of it. That numbness, more familiar than it should be.

God, I need sleep.

Instead she scrounged a cup of tea from the bar and wandered toward the windows, letting her eyes rest on the stars, willing the tension out of her body, trying to relax, muscle by muscle. But the stars were letting her down: all she could see, every time she blinked, was burned corpses, disintegrating filament, and the last Syndicate ship escaping into the dark. She closed her eyes, and she saw the dead woman again, and in her ear Farias whispered, “No help …”

“Songbird?”

That familiar voice, so hesitant. For a moment she felt something that was not despair. She opened her eyes and turned to face him. “Dee,” she said, and almost smiled.

Even while shifting debris with him on Exeter, she had noticed how little he had changed over the years, although she supposed her memory was selective. Apart from his formerly shaved head—now covered in half of a tight-curled centimeter of black hair—and the utter exhaustion on his face, he could still have passed for twenty-six. His face was unlined and unscarred, despite his battle experience, and his broad shoulders were still well-defined enough to show through his thick uniform shirt. She remembered wondering, when she had first met him, if any of it was fat; and then she had seen him training, half-dressed, his dark skin stretched over nothing but muscle and sinew. She remembered how his skin felt under her hands as she traced those muscles with her palm: smooth and cool, except when he woke at night, when it felt clammy, her palms sticking as she tried to soothe his nerves. The nightmares had lessened before she left, but they had not disappeared, and she wondered if he still had them.

She did.

Part of her wanted to embrace him again, just to prove to herself that he really was all right; but he was not on his own. Jimmy Youda stood next to him, looking less exhausted, but far more drunk. She gave him a nod, and a smile, and he waved his glass blearily at her. Uninjured, at least; she wondered where he had been during the battle.

He had aged less gracefully than Dee, although he had started out more handsome: lean, chiseled, striking—almost as head-turning as Greg, although without the sharp wit in his eyes. But he had more lines on his face than she remembered, more than men she knew who were older, and she wondered how his career had gone after she left. Dee had become second-in-command; not the youngest in the fleet, but still recognized earlier than most. Jimmy had acquired his M.D., and was a lieutenant commander on Exeter’s medical team. An average promotion run: not exceptional, but certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

He’s in charge of Exeter’s medical team now, she thought, remembering the quick look she’d had at the casualty list.

Jimmy had always handled his drinking impressively well, she recalled; anesthetizing himself at night seemed to leave him fit for duty during the day. She suspected he was close to numb by now. She couldn’t blame him. If she were capable of drinking, she would have taken the same approach. Of course Jimmy always got angry, she recalled, before the anesthetic took proper effect. On this day she was not inclined to blame him. “How are you holding up?” she asked him.

Jimmy snorted something that sounded like a laugh, and stared into his glass. “Is that a joke?” he asked, tossing back the remains of the drink.

“No,” she said, “but that sounds like an answer.”

His eyes shot into hers, angry and resentful. “Still judging, I see.”

“Come on, Youda,” Dee said.

“But that was always your thing, wasn’t it?” Jimmy went on, as if Dee had said nothing. “Tell us all what we should feel. How we should handle it. You going to tell me how I should handle this?”

His rage was palpable, and it felt strangely personal. “I’m not going to tell you anything,” she replied, as gently as she could. Why would she try to tell anyone how to process something like this?

Jimmy fell silent, mollified, and Dee risked looking away from him. “I heard you got Farias out of the brig alive. Have you talked to him yet?”

She shook her head. “I just got back.” And she suspected it would be some time before the man would be ready to talk to anyone. Still, while she had Dee’s attention, she risked doing some fishing. “Dee, the way we found him—was there someone in your brig when you were attacked?”

“Why do you want to know?” Jimmy asked her. His tone was just short of being openly hostile, and she remembered, then, how he had behaved after Canberra, where they had lost only one man. Jimmy’s usual, somewhat forced charm had disintegrated into prickly hostility, the reality of what they had been through removing most of his desire to get along with anyone. Canberra had knocked his legs out from under him; she could only guess what this incident had done.

She decided to be as honest as she could. “I was wondering about the dead raider I found outside,” she said. “If he was the prisoner. If they might have been trying to break him out.”

“Did a pretty shitty job of it if they were, didn’t they?”

Jimmy had always been a good medic, and she had no doubt he was now a good doctor; but when he wasn’t dealing with a patient, he could be tiresomely cynical. “Actually,” she pushed, “it occurred to me they were executing him. It’s possible he got caught in that alcove by accident, but I doubt it.”

She had expected curiosity at that remark, or even defensiveness. Instead, Dee and Jimmy exchanged a quick glance, and she brought her chin up. “What is it?” she asked.

Dee said, “Nothing,” just as Jimmy said, “None of your business, Shaw.”

Shit. Like hell it’s none of my business. “You know something.” Her eyes went to Dee, who was looking away. “Both of you.”

“We know it was a waste,” Jimmy snapped.

“Shut up,” Dee hissed at him, and shot her an apologetic glance. “He’s drunk,” he explained.

“Yeah, but he’s talking to me,” she said, turning back to Jimmy. “What was a waste?”

“He shouldn’t even have been prosecuted, if you ask me,” Jimmy declared, his thick tongue loosened. “He was following orders. He was a patriot.”

Elena began to wonder how long he had been drinking. “The raider was a patriot? What are you talking about?”

Jimmy ignored her interruption. “They hung him out to dry because they didn’t need him anymore, thanks to you. You never could mind your own fucking business, Shaw.”

“Shut the fuck up, Youda. That’s an order,” Dee snapped.

“Fuck you, Keita. I’m the fucking chief of medicine now. You have no authority over med.”

Elena ignored their squabble, her head spinning with blind confusion. “My fault? How could an attack in the Third Sector be my fault?”

“Youda, goddammit, I swear—”

“We wouldn’t have been carrying him if you hadn’t made yourself out to be a fucking hero,” Jimmy yelled at Elena, “stopping a fucking war with some backwater pirates at the expense of every other fucking thing that mattered!”

And it came to her then, with ice-cold certainty, freezing away all of her exhaustion. His court-martial, unlike hers and Greg’s, had been secret, despite the fact that his crime had been far more central to everything that had happened last year; and his punishment had lacked any mercy at all.

“MacBride. You were carrying Niall MacBride.”

“Were being the operative word,” Jimmy snarled, raising a mock toast.

She turned to Dee, dumbfounded. His face was shuttered. “Don’t ask me,” he warned her. “I’m under orders, Songbird, and I outrank you.”

She felt as if someone had wrapped a fist around her stomach and twisted. Niall MacBride, court-martialed alongside her and Greg, but for vastly different charges: incitement to war. Although, from Jimmy’s response, it seemed rumors of the truth were rampant. MacBride had been found guilty—quietly—and sentenced discreetly. And now, apparently, he had been sprung out of prison, the cost a mere ninety-seven trained Corps soldiers, and one starship.

“I think,” she told Dee, “we need to talk to Captain Foster.”

CHAPTER 8
Orunmila

All the way back to Orunmila, Guanyin stayed silent, listening to the others talking in subdued voices about what they had seen. She stared out the window as her ship, intact and safe, grew larger in the shuttle’s front window. The last few hours had been a blur of faces, some injured, some panicked, all stunned, as Exeter’s surviving crew members had regrouped and recognized what had happened to their home. To her consternation she found herself cast in the role of savior, and more than once was subjected to a grateful and rather desperate embrace. One man, some years older than she was, had started to weep, and she had held him as gently as she could until Keita’s people brought in a medic. Keita extracted the man from her arms with more compassion than she would have credited him with, and traveled with him back to Galileo with the other wounded.

She had thought Commander Shaw’s assessment had been premature, but based on what she had overheard, the crew fully expected that Exeter was going to be scrapped. Another incomprehensible Central custom. Apart from the destroyed engine room, the ship had sustained very little damage. Guanyin thought her own people could have repaired it within two months, given the parts. But there was more to it than that, she learned as she absorbed snatches of conversation: it seemed Central was inclined to quietly retire ships that had suffered such devastating damage. Instead of harvesting older ships to repair Exeter, Exeter herself would be parted out and recycled; and Captain Çelik, regardless of how well he recovered, would likely be shuffled off to some sort of bureaucratic position.

And that, she thought, as Cali maneuvered the shuttle into Orunmila’s fore hangar, would be the end of him.

She unclipped her harness and rose absently to her feet, hanging on to the hand grip toward the ceiling. It was none of her business how they dealt with their officers. After ten years as second-in-command and six months as captain, she should have learned how to let go of anger over things she could not change. At least this time she could funnel it into something useful.

Yunru was waiting for her on the tarmac, his arms full of their two-year-old daughter. Lin’s dark head lay against his shoulder, her round arms locked around his neck. Even from a distance Guanyin could see the child frowning. She quickened her step, leaving Cali behind.

“What is it, my little gumdrop?” she asked as she approached.

Lin turned and held out her arms, her face dissolving. Guanyin met Yunru’s eyes as she relieved him of his burden, bouncing Lin gently and rubbing her back as she snuffled noisily into Guanyin’s neck.

“She wanted to wait up for you,” he said. “I told her no. She has been objecting for the last three hours.”

Overtired and unhappy, just like Mama, Guanyin thought. “Lin, my love, I miss you, too. But you must sleep, dear. And you must listen to what your father tells you.”

Still carrying Lin, she fell into step with Yunru. “I’ll hang on to her if you like,” she said. “You get some sleep.”

He gave her a curious look. “You look like you need it more than I do.”

“I may,” she conceded, “but I’m too furious at the moment to close my eyes. And I have to make a comm.”

There was a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Don’t curse in front of her, okay? She’s too good a mimic.”

“It won’t matter,” she said, giving him a smile. “I’ll be speaking Standard.”

He leaned over to rub Lin briefly on the back. Lin made an angry sound of objection, and nestled herself more firmly against Guanyin’s neck. Guanyin would have chided her, but Yunru just smiled and headed back to the suite they shared with the children.

By the time Guanyin reached her office Lin had stopped crying, and grown drowsy against Guanyin’s shoulder. She shifted the little girl as she sat, and took a few minutes to whisper to her gently until she fell asleep. It was a bad habit to instill, she knew, letting the child doze off in her arms; but soon enough Lin would be too old for it. Cali always told her she was worse with the children than she was with Samedi. Which was, Guanyin reflected, perfectly true, and one maternal luxury she never intended to give up.

When she placed the comm to Galileo, she kept the vid turned off.

They had an officer filtering all incoming messages. He sounded young, and appropriately intimidated when she identified herself, and she felt a little better. By the time Captain Foster came on the line, she had resurrected all of her outrage.

“Captain Shiang,” he began, in that measured, polite tone of his, “on behalf of Central, I wanted to thank you for coming to Exeter’s aid. She would not have survived without your assistance.”

Chanyu had spent a lot of time teaching her manners. She had never much cared for them.

“From what I have heard said,” she told him, “Exeter did not, in fact, survive. Is my understanding correct?”

A pause on the line. “Yes,” he said, and she was surprised at his candor. “But that doesn’t change the fact that three hundred people are alive now who would not have been if they’d had to wait for us.”

“PSI are not so cynical as you are, Captain Foster.” Her rage felt cold; she wanted him to feel cold as well. “We do not let any ship fight off such an attack alone when we are able to help. We would even help Galileo, if it came to that. But now that the crisis is finished, we must leave you.”

“Captain Shiang,” he said, “if this is because of our earlier exchange—”

“It is not.” Full points, though, she had to admit, for his being willing to shoulder the blame. She had read that he was an honorable man. It was the only consistent thing in all of the reports of him she had found. “Captain Foster, do you know how many people I have on my ship?”

“Eight hundred,” he replied. He sounded resigned, and she wondered if he already knew what she was going to say.

“And are you aware that it is my personal responsibility to look after each one of those people?”

“I believe our respective services view the role similarly, Captain.”

Do not try to ally yourself with me. “I will help any ship in distress, Captain, but I will not give assistance to an organization that has chosen to use subterfuge to obtain our trust, that has deliberately concealed intelligence, and that allowed us to enter a volatile situation with insufficient understanding.”

There was silence on the line again, and this time she waited for him. But when he spoke, he sounded genuinely confused. “What are you talking about?”

She felt a sudden desire to shout at him. Captain Çelik would not have bothered pretending; he would have told her flat-out that he had lied to her—or better yet, he would have been up front to begin with. “Do not tell me that this attack was not anticipated,” she continued over his objection. “You assign an additional Corps warship to this area, just before an organized Syndicate raider attack? On a scale that has not been seen in this sector in twenty years? Why is it that we were closer to Exeter than you were, Captain? Why was it that my people were first in the line of fire?”

“Exeter was first in the line of fire, Captain Shiang.”

“I am not interested in your self-righteousness,” she told him coldly. “I am not comming you to listen to more prevarication. I am comming you to let you know that once we have a tracker report from the escaped raider, we will be leaving this area, and you may pursue the criminal on your own.”

There was a brief silence. “You’re really going to ignore what happened here?”

Let him think she was foolish enough to let an organized attack pass without investigation. “Once we have given you the raider’s location, we have no intention of engaging in further contact with you or your ship.”

“Is that just Galileo, or Central in general?” She could not be certain, but she thought she caught a note of humorless dryness in his tone.

“I will accept reports on Captain Çelik’s condition,” she told him, without answering his question. “Should you find the accused raider and exact your justice, we will hear of it without your help.”

More silence. “How many Central starships have you dealt with, besides Exeter?” he asked.

Damned if she was going to tell him that. “Raiders rarely have a range of more than twelve hours,” she said. “I am expecting a signal before that time has expired. When we receive the information, we will transmit it to your ship, and our interaction will be concluded. Am I making myself understood?”

“Very clearly, Captain Shiang.”

“And please tell your Admiralty,” she added, “that they need expend no more energy trying to ease our concerns about their troop buildup here. PSI’s allegiance is to each other. We will continue to battle the Syndicates and their raiding parties as we always have—by ourselves. Your allies are your own problem. Good evening, Captain Foster.”

She cut him off and looked down to find Lin staring at her, her dark eyes wide open.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, dear,” she said gently.

Lin blinked. “Samedi?” she asked.

Guanyin carried the little girl through the interior door into her quarters. On the other side the rest of her children slept, and one room beyond that, Yunru was, with any luck, getting some hard-earned rest. Guanyin felt immeasurably better having had her say; she thought her gnawing worry over Çelik might settle enough for her to get some sleep herself.

Samedi, who had been dozing on the couch, looked up when she came in. She laid Lin gently next to him and went for a blanket. When she came back, the ordinarily irrepressible puppy had curled up against the little girl, who had hooked an arm around his neck. I should let her train Samedi, Guanyin reflected. He is certainly more mindful of her than he is of me.

She shook out the blanket and pulled it over the pair, then tugged off her own uniform to get ready for bed.

CHAPTER 9
Galileo

Raman Çelik was well-known as a pragmatic man. He always saw the reality of what was before him, with all its attendant possibility and detail, and had a knack for choosing the most efficient solution to any problem. He could fix a generator or defuse a bar fight, and he always knew when it was time to cut his losses and move on. For years people had said that Captain Çelik could turn straw into gold—or bullshit into steak. He found those descriptions tiresome. People who said such things about him tended to have slow minds and no imagination, and he almost always ignored them.

His own imagination was failing him at the moment. He supposed it was medication-induced grogginess. He had known when he woke, even with his eyes closed, that he was not on Exeter. The room smelled wrong. Even in the antiseptic confines of her infirmary—and his nose told him he was in someone’s infirmary—he knew the odors of his ship.

The infirmary was on her starboard side, opposite the engine room. It would still be intact.

The engine room.

What had they been doing? His gunners were in the engine room. They had fired, and they had missed, but why? Something was wrong. They were all dead, of course, but there was something else. His own survival, perhaps. With his ship gut-shot, he should not be here. Duty dictated that he go down with her. Perhaps he had, and this sterile, odd-smelling infirmary was some sort of near-death hallucination.

He opened his eyes and squinted into the bright light of the ceiling. “Fucking hell,” he croaked, forcing his voice through his dry throat, “turn down the fucking lights.”

A man’s deep voice said something unintelligible, and the light dimmed, but not enough. A moment later, a head and shoulders appeared in his line of sight, silhouetted by the illuminated ceiling. “How are you feeling, Captain Çelik?”

Should he know the voice? “That’s a stupid fucking question,” he said. He had been drugged. He had passed out from pain and blood loss. He was supposed to be dead. Who was this idiot?

“Mentally fit, I see,” the voice said, and Raman relaxed. “How much do you remember?”

Something had happened. What had that PSI doctor said …? “I lost my leg.”

“You did,” confirmed the voice. “Doctor Xiao did a nice job of cauterizing the wound. We shouldn’t have any trouble growing you a graft. But in the meantime, it’s going to hurt like a son of a bitch.”

And just like that, Raman’s brain registered the pain: white-hot, nearly numbing, all the nerve endings screaming with nothing attached. He could feel his toes, the toes he did not have anymore. He had always thought that was a myth. “What about the rest of me?”

“Concussion, contusions, small femoral fracture, one deep cut on your back under a left rib. About what you’d expect for a firefight.”

He liked this doctor and his dry practicality. “Who are you?”

“Commander Robert Hastings, chief medical officer, CCSS Galileo,” the man said smoothly.

Raman frowned. The name was familiar. “We’ve met.”

“Three years ago, on Aleph Six.”

“Did we get on?”

“Not even a little bit.”

That made sense. Raman preferred people who were not so easy to charm. “When can I get up?”

Of all things, that question made the doctor hedge. “The drug Doctor Xiao gave you is going to be in your system for a few more hours,” he began.

Raman interrupted him with a snort. “Cut the shit, Doctor-Commander Hastings. If you don’t know, say so.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

Another pause. Raman was becoming annoyed, and it was clearing his head. “In cases such as this,” the doctor said cautiously, “the psychological aftereffects of the incident are less predictable than the physical.”

“The ‘incident’ being the crippling of my ship. The deaths of my crew.”

“Yes.”

“Did we talk long, on Aleph Six?”

“No, Captain Çelik.”

“Then I forgive you for talking like a mealymouthed, muddleheaded psychiatrist. Please don’t call it ‘the incident.’ It was an attack, a battle, and Exeter lost. That we will remedy that situation is not in question. Are we clear here?”

“Yes, sir.” Hastings sounded unhappy, but he was, as Raman had guessed, a practical man.

“Good. Now when can I get up?”

“Six hours.”

“I’ll need a temporary prosthetic.”

“I can’t recommend that, sir.”

Good Lord, he had forgotten how aggravating doctors could be. “Why would that be?”

“A prosthetic that is not specifically grown for your physiology will be uncomfortable, and by its nature not properly functional.”

“That’s acceptable for a temporary.”

“Exactly, Captain. But if it stays on too long, or if it’s damaged while it’s grafted to you, we’d be looking at an above-the-knee amputation and a much more complicated growth for a permanent fix. Recovery time will be months instead of weeks, and you may never see full mobility out of the device.”

“What’s too long?”

Hastings shook his head, defeated. “Three days. Possibly four, if you don’t damage it. But I can’t give you painkillers while you’re wearing it, sir. They’ll interfere with the electrical impulses and you won’t be able to control it.”

Raman took a moment to let the heat of his missing leg wash over him, and his head swam. “Will it hurt more or less than it does now?”

“Less,” Hastings said. “Probably.”

“How long will it take you to attach it?”

“An hour, maybe a little more.”

Raman nodded. “Proceed then, Doctor,” he said, letting his eyes close again. “And when you’re finished, and you can see your way clear to letting me get the fuck out of here, I will speak with my crew standing on my own two feet. So to speak.”

He heard nothing for a moment, and then he heard the shuffle of feet as Hastings turned and walked away. Definitely practical, Raman thought. Practical people were so much more useful than empathic ones.

CHAPTER 10

Greg poured a generous measure of whisky into the glass on his desk, and nudged it in the direction of the officer sitting across from him. “Start from the beginning, Commander.”

Dmitri Keita glanced briefly at Elena, seated beside him, before reaching out and lifting the glass. He sniffed it first, then raised his eyebrows and sipped. Greg was surprised; Commander Keita had not struck him as a connoisseur. Under the circumstances he would have expected the man to gulp the liquid, but even traumatized he clearly recognized quality. Greg felt briefly ashamed of the amount of the stuff he had guzzled unceremoniously when he was still drinking.

Quality had not mattered to him at all.

When Elena brought Keita to his office, Greg had resisted the urge to call the man “son.” Despite being only three years younger than Greg, and fully as tall, there was something in his face: an earnest innocence that suggested vulnerability. Elena had hovered over him like a worried parent, which had puzzled Greg at first. All he knew of Keita was what he had read in her official report of the incident on Canberra, nearly eight years ago now. She had not seemed protective of Keita in the report. Indeed, she had emphasized the team’s dependence on his strategy and marksmanship, and his bravery when rescuing the infant. Over the years she had spoken only obliquely of Canberra, and almost never of Keita, although Greg knew she kept in loose touch with him.

She perched on the edge of her chair now, leaning toward Exeter’s second-in-command, her eyebrows firmly knit together, fairly vibrating with focus on her old friend. An unwelcome thought wandered into Greg’s head, and the urge to call the man “son” vanished, replaced by the need to keep the exchange professional and as brief as possible.

Keita took a breath and leaned back, his hand still curled around the whisky. “We were back on Earth three weeks ago, a little after you were,” he said. “Everyone was still talking about you two, but nobody really understood everything that happened. At least nobody at my rank.” He was quiet a moment, and Greg wondered if Keita thought he would elaborate. “Nobody much thought about MacBride—his trial was a lot less high-profile than yours, and he never had your … celebrity. Sir.” Keita shifted, and Greg sensed disapproval. “But most of us figured, well, he’d screwed up, and someone was taking care of it. Right? Because that’s what we do. We figure out how to punish people, and we do it, and it’s sane and sensible and all in the interests of the Greater Good.” Greg heard the emphasis in his bitter voice.

“And I wouldn’t have thought about it at all anymore, but the day before we left Captain Çelik called me into his office, took everything off the record, and told me we were going to be transporting Captain MacBride to the prison system out by Xihoudu. I didn’t understand why it needed to be secret, but I didn’t ask.”

Greg interrupted. “Who else was assigned to the task?”

“Initially, only me, Farias the brig officer, and Doctor Lawson, but Lawson had to pull in a team.” He turned to Elena. “That’s how Jimmy got involved.”

“Why did you need a med team?”

Keita shifted and dropped his eyes, taking a moment to sip the whisky. “They transferred him to us unconscious, sir. Drugged. Told us he needed to be fed intravenously, because he’d been on a hunger strike.”

That, Greg thought, made no sense at all. What could MacBride have hoped to gain from a hunger strike? “Did your doctor confirm that?”

Keita nodded. “But that’s not why he brought Jimmy—Doctor Youda in. Lawson let the drugs wear off the first afternoon. Said he wanted to examine MacBride, and he wasn’t going to do it while the man couldn’t speak for himself. And … as soon as he woke up, Captain MacBride started ranting. Screaming about being set up, about injustice, calling the Admiralty a pack of cowardly murderers. That sort of thing.”

Now that, Greg thought, sounds like MacBride. “Who heard him?”

“I did, sir. And Doc Lawson, and Jimmy.”

“What did you do?”

“Doc Lawson drugged him again,” Keita said, and Greg thought he disapproved of that as well. “He told me MacBride was a danger to himself. But he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he said it.”

Lawson’s name, Greg remembered, had been on the casualty list. If he had known more than Keita about what was going on, he could tell no one now. “What makes you think the attack was over MacBride?”

Keita’s eyes met Elena’s again, and Greg saw her nod, almost imperceptibly. “It’s an anomaly, and I suppose I am assuming the anomalies are all related. Using a starship to transport MacBride, the Syndicate attack on a Corps ship, their disproportionate firepower—” He stopped there, and Greg wondered if he was including Exeter’s feeble attempts at self-defense in his mental list. Instead, he added something that required more imagination than Greg would have initially suspected of him. “And the timing, sir.”

“Timing?”

“I’m not privy to most of it, sir, but Captain Çelik does talk.” He exchanged another glance with Elena. “You being here in the Third Sector, after you were exonerated.” Greg didn’t correct him. “And nobody understanding exactly what happened out there with PSI, or even really what MacBride did or didn’t do. Captain Çelik says nobody can even cogently explain why he was court-martialed.”

“Incitement to war,” Greg said automatically. In reality, of course, it was for disobeying orders; but the branch of the Admiralty who had given him those orders could not charge him with insubordination without admitting they had given the order in the first place.

Keita made an impatient gesture. “Whatever the charge, sir, are you going to tell me all of this is happening now for no reason?”

“Coincidences do happen.”

“Bullshit, sir.” His eyes blazed, and Greg thought under other circumstances he would like Keita. Instead of rebuking him for the outburst, Greg held the younger man’s gaze steadily, and after a moment Keita shifted and dropped his eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain.”

“Given the day, Commander, I’ll let it go,” Greg said. He avoided looking at Elena. “Why do you think it’s bullshit?”

“Because …” Keita was struggling. “It can’t be coincidence. Not like this. What happened to Exeter … you can’t tell me that was for nothing.”

Keita looked suddenly vulnerable again, and Greg felt exhausted. So many things did happen for nothing, but he did not think this distressed officer could stand to face that just now. He needed to get Keita out so he could unravel this with Elena. “Thank you for your time, Commander,” he said. “You’re dismissed.”

Keita processed the abrupt order, but he did not lose his temper this time. He stood, saluted stiffly, and turned.

“Commander,” Greg called after him. When Keita turned back, he held out the open bottle of scotch. “Take this,” he said. “Share it with your friends.”

Keita gave him a puzzled look, but wrapped his fingers around the bottle and nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and when he left he looked a little less stiff.

Greg sat down again, and ran his hands over his face and into his short-cropped hair. Elena was watching the door where Keita had gone, and he had the distinct impression she was avoiding looking at him. “Smart guy,” he remarked.

“Yes,” she said absently. “He always was.”

“How long were you involved with him?”

She turned back, surprised. At another time he would have laughed at her; she was always startled by how transparent she was. “About three months,” she said warily. “Maybe a little less.”

“Do you trust him?”

At that she sighed and slumped back in the chair, exhaustion washing over her face. “I am not objective about Dee,” she said unwillingly. “Which is to say that yes, I trust him, but I recognize at this point in my life that my instincts about such things are not always particularly accurate.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

She nodded. “But whether it’s the whole truth, I don’t know.”

“He may not know the whole truth.”

“Do you ever get tired of all this secret spy bullshit?”

He had grown tired of it the moment he had lost a member of his own crew to it the year before, and a single casualty paled in the face of what had been done to Exeter. “There’s no reason Keita would be involved in this,” he argued aloud. “No reason Çelik would be, either. Or anyone else on Exeter, really. But someone is. The coincidence that your friend doesn’t want to see is not that it all happened now, but that it all happened at once. And maybe that Orunmila was close enough to defend. I’m not convinced there would have been much left of Exeter if they’d had to wait until we got there.”

“I don’t like PSI being pulled into this. Too many admirals in Shadow Ops are ready to use them as a catalyst for war.”

“Not going to do much good when they’re throwing their ships bodily between ours and the enemy, and shifting broken bulkheads to rescue our injured officers.”

“It’s awfully risky for them, though, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Who? PSI?”

“Shadow Ops. Assuming they’re the ones behind this. Exeter’s a well-known ship. To finance an attack … of course other ships were going to show up to help her. They couldn’t possibly have been confident of a victory.”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but they got one, didn’t they?”

“I’m just thinking it might be a coincidence after all.”

He shook his head. “With what Jessica found in their weapons systems?”

“I know.” Exhausted again. “I just—I’m not Dee, Greg. I want it to be an accident. Bad timing. A rogue Syndicate tribe, a random equipment failure, them grabbing a prisoner just for the hell of it. I know there has to be more to it, but God, it’s awful enough without adding conspiracies on top of it.”

The final list had been ninety-seven people. A full quarter of Exeter’s crew. Greg had sent the list back to Central, and had offered to help notify the families. Ordinarily, that would be Çelik’s job, but Greg wouldn’t hazard a guess as to when the man would be up to it. He was not sure he himself could be up to such a job, were it his own crew.

He agreed with Elena. He wanted Keita to be wrong as well. He wanted this tragedy to be one rogue, stupid Syndicate tribe, and nothing more. He wanted to take the revenge the Corps would demand, to pursue and destroy the tribe that did all of this, and ignore the tendrils that reached out into secret areas of his own government, areas half his own chain of command didn’t know existed.

There were so few of them who knew the whole story, and only one person who had been through it all with him. And he needed her thinking clearly, instead of dwelling on the horror.

Which is more than I have the right to ask of anyone.

“We need more information before we draw conclusions,” he reminded her. They were missing too many pieces. He had no doubt someone had gone after MacBride, but he couldn’t yet understand why.

Elena’s shoulders straightened, just a little, and some of the tension left her. “When will we hear from that tracker?” she asked.

He rubbed his eyes again. “Captain Shiang thinks somewhere in the next five hours or so.”

“You talked to her.”

“After a fashion. She commed me earlier to tell me to fuck off.”

Elena’s eyebrows shot up, and to his amazement she looked faintly amused. “You personally?”

“Kind of, yeah.” He related the conversation, such as it was. “And you know, Elena? I hadn’t thought of how it must look to her. One minute I’m playing the friendly representative of the Big Bad Admiralty, explaining to her that no, really, there’s no special reason we’ve deployed an extra warship in the area, and the next someone’s actually blowing the hell out of a ship she’s worked with.”

“It matters to her, doesn’t it? Exeter.”

“I think if Central really cared about getting Shiang on their good side, they’d have had Çelik talk to her years ago.”

She was silent a moment. “Greg, why didn’t anyone tell us about MacBride? Why was the transport classified in the first place?”

It was a good question. “Your friend Jimmy Youda was a pretty weak link,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but be fair: he wasn’t in on it at first. And Jimmy gets spiky when he’s upset. I don’t think he’d be a security risk under ordinary circumstances.”

And that thought bothered Greg. In the last several decades, Central had been fortunate: Corps deployments were often relatively uneventful, the kinds of troubles they ran into small, familiar, and manageable. But no Corps soldier should allow themselves to forget that extraordinary circumstances happened. He wanted suddenly to talk to Çelik about Exeter’s crew, and whom Çelik himself trusted. Greg shook his head. “This whole business stinks. I don’t even know if I should comm back for orders. If it was Shadow Ops that grabbed MacBride, anything the Admiralty might tell us right now is probably bullshit.”

“Greg,” she asked suddenly, “do you think Herrod is part of Shadow Ops?”

Greg had spent the better part of a month pondering that question. “He may not be officially on the payroll, but he knows what they get up to.”

“He gave us good advice,” she recalled. “To stay together. To be careful.”

It took Greg a moment to catch on to what she was saying. “You think he’s on our side.” He shook his head. “It’s dangerous to assume that, Elena. Half of what he’s said to me I have a feeling is off the record. We always need to assume when we talk to him we’re talking to them.”

“Still. I think if you contact him as part of the Admiralty—”

“—that he’ll give us real orders?”

“As opposed to running us into another raider attack? I think it’s possible.”

“ ‘Possible’ is a little hair-raising, Elena.”

“So is what happened to Exeter,” she countered. “Greg, they’re going to expect us to find out about MacBride. If we don’t comm back for orders, what are they going to assume?”

How do we live like this, he thought, second- and third-guessing every single word anyone says to us anymore? He rubbed his eyes. “Jessica’s already filed the preliminary report. The Admiralty has agreed to quarantine the area. But I don’t want to ask them for anything else until Jess finishes dissecting Exeter’s logs, and we get something back on that tracker. I don’t want to risk getting sent off somewhere we don’t want to go.”

“Do you think you can still get away with that kind of thing?”

“What kind of thing?”

She gestured into the air. “This thing you do, where you get an order and you ignore it, until you decide how to convince them to give you what you want.”

He blinked; he had never thought of it like that. “You think I disobey orders?”

“I think you interpret them creatively. Greg, after all this, they’re going to be a lot more careful with you than they have been.”

He had felt it already, the subtle shift in power that came from not being an unquestioned hero anymore. He had never cared much about his reputation, but now that it was damaged he was beginning to recognize its usefulness. “They can be careful once we know what’s going on,” he told her. He watched her haul herself wearily to her feet. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to talk to Çelik,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because as we stand here chatting about whether or not our own people are after us, I’d just as soon have Orunmila on our side. And you said yourself Captain Shiang cares about Exeter. Maybe Çelik can talk her around.”

“I’ve already sent Jess after him.”

“You afraid of us tag-teaming him?”

She sounded mildly amused again, and the moment felt familiar, the way they had been with each other before everything had gone to hell. “I’m just suggesting that he might not be especially receptive to you just now.”

He could order her to leave Çelik alone, and she would obey him; but he understood her thinking. She had a preexisting relationship with Çelik. He remembered the other captain’s notes on her transfer orders: If she doesn’t learn to keep her mouth shut, she’ll either get tossed out of this outfit, or be running it in less than ten years. Even then, Greg had known enough of Raman Çelik to recognize the statement as a compliment.

“I don’t need him to be receptive,” Elena said, turning away. “I just need him to stay still long enough for me to yell. And I want to do it while I’m still too exhausted to care if he yells back.”

CHAPTER 11

Jessica had expected the infirmary to be far more crowded. All of the beds in the main ward were taken, and most of the seats in the waiting area; but most of the wounded she could see were alert and talking quietly. She caught the eye of Redlaw, the head nurse, and he came closer so they could speak without being overheard.

“The casualty rate is pretty low,” he said. “Most of the losses were immediate, or shortly afterward. Çelik is the worst, although there are a couple of head injuries I’m keeping an eye on.” He frowned at her. “You look like hell.”

“So I’ve been told.” She relented enough to give him a smile; all she’d had to face was a dead ship’s core. “I’m sorry, Fran. This being in charge shit doesn’t suit me all that well.”

“Today isn’t suiting anyone well, Commander,” he said, and she remembered why she liked him. “You’re on your feet? You’re doing fine.”

She moved slowly through the ward on her way to the private room at the end. Some of the soldiers were dozing—on their own or with assistance she could not tell—but most were sitting up, surrounded by people from both Exeter and Galileo. Despite the chatter, there was a stillness to the room, a hushed heaviness that clung to her skin like sweat. Jessica always hated the aftermath of tragedy. It involved far too much paralysis.

It reminded her far too much of home.

She headed for Doctor Hastings, who was studying a readout at his desk at the end of the ward. Beyond him, she could see the open door of the private room where Captain Çelik was staying. A small, cowardly part of herself was hoping he would be asleep.

“Is he up?” she asked Bob.

“He’s been up for three hours,” Bob replied, his expression sour. “He’s clobbering the hell out of that new leg.”

“Can’t you stop him?”

“Is that a joke?”

Jessica stole a surreptitious look through the door of the private room. Çelik was walking around the bed—slowly—testing his balance on the artificial leg. Jessica had never seen a metal prosthetic before—grafts were much more common these days, although they took time—and she found herself impressed at how well he was doing with it. His gait was slow and uneven, and he seemed to test the odd, spidery, six-toed foot every time he set it down; but he made repeated circuits around the bed without hanging on to anything. He would never be graceful on it, but he would be able to move. She couldn’t think of more than one or two officers who would be so tenacious and disciplined in this situation, and one of them she was already serving under.

What the fuck is wrong with the Admiralty, that they’d retire the man over this?

She swallowed her anger. None of this was her call, and feeling righteous wrath on his behalf wasn’t going to make what she had to tell him any easier.

Jessica stepped forward into the doorway and stood at attention, waiting. Çelik, who had certainly seen her, did not alter his careful path across the floor. She felt a moment’s uncertainty—should she wait for him to speak first?—before remembering her still-unfamiliar rank. “Captain Çelik,” she said politely, “I have a report on what happened to your ship during the attack.”

His eyes shot into hers, although he did not stop walking. “As I was there, Commander Lockwood, I’m pretty sure I don’t need your report.”

Oh, the rage that came with that look. She found it comforting, after a fashion. If he was angry, that meant he was likely to be still thinking, at least enough to help her out. “I’m referring to Exeter’s lack of defense,” she clarified, never doubting he’d known what she meant.

He looked away from her again. She would have thought he would be watching his feet, but instead he stared straight ahead, gaze unfocused. “Do you know what the worst of it is?” he asked incongruously. “It’s slow. I feel the pain in the stump where it’s attached before I get the feedback from the foot and the ankle. It’s not my balance that’s the problem. It’s my brain trying to decode nonsense.”

She took his change of subject as tacit agreement to hear her report. “Your gunner isn’t culpable, sir,” she said. “Your targeting systems were taken out before the attack, probably at least sixteen hours earlier.”

“Wasn’t.”

“Sir?”

“My gunner wasn’t culpable. He’s dead.” His tone was icy, derisive.

He’s angry with me. Jessica, who had a closer acquaintance with death than most of her crewmates, absorbed his fury without complaint. “Wasn’t, sir,” she corrected herself.

Stomp, clank. Jessica wondered if they couldn’t make something a bit less robotic, even for a temporary. Çelik had enough oddness to deal with. “Why isn’t your time frame more precise?” he asked.

“Parts of the core were damaged, sir.”

“Any suspects?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Weapons are under command codes, sir, but not priority ones. They’re not that hard to crack.”

Another look, although this one was more calculating than angry. “Not for you,” he said. “For the average Corps grunt?”

“Your people all have excellent reputations, sir, including the infantry. But if you’re assuming someone figured it out on their own, then … no, sir, not for the average Corps grunt. Although I imagine most of your cyber people could have done it.”

Stomp, clank. “You’re saying it requires knowledge, but not skill.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which doesn’t eliminate anyone.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then, the information isn’t actually helpful, is it?”

“I don’t agree, sir.”

That stopped him. He turned to face her down, and she looked up at him, careful not to react. Jessica was short, and most people made her feel tiny. But Çelik—wide and glowering and angry—made her feel like an insect. He had a reputation for being ill-tempered and intimidating, and Jessica was discovering it was not exaggerated. What was interesting was how deliberate it was, how much of what he was doing to her was designed to get her to respond. He was, in a way, the diametric opposite of her own captain. Greg turned everything inside, measuring and calculating before he moved. Çelik targeted everyone with laser-precise shots, daring them to react to him.

Jessica was used to people thinking they could intimidate her by making her feel small. It had never worked.

“How long have you been second-in-command of this ship, Commander?” he asked her.

“Eight months, sir.” Eight long, bureaucracy-filled months—too many of them spent worrying that Greg was going to get demoted … or fired. He’d given her the job because he knew she could run the ship in his absence.

Never mind if I wanted to do it.

“And exactly how is it you feel entitled to tell me you know what the hell you’re doing?”

Well, it was hardly surprising she had struck a nerve. “Because I do, sir. I was hacking computer cores long before I hit command. Are we going to keep arguing about this, sir, or are we going to discuss what we’re going to do about it?”

He straightened a little, and she took a breath, realizing she had frozen under his looming gaze. “How’s your security?” he asked her.

“On alert,” she told him. Greg had ordered the heightened security before they started taking on Exeter’s crew—even before she had proof that the battle had been anything other than one starship overwhelmed by numbers. They had people monitoring all of the strangers, but Jessica would feel better after they offloaded them to Cassia.

And how much do I hate myself for suspecting my fellow soldiers? She had mistrusted Greg’s previous second-in-command, and with good reason, but suspicion always made her feel angry and irritable.

Çelik was looking away from her, frowning. That, at least, was a look she knew: Greg had it sometimes, when he had absorbed everything he could and was sorting through it in his head. “I need to speak to them,” he said abruptly, “and then I’ll talk with Foster.” He focused on her again. “Where are the rest of my people?”

She escorted Çelik to the pub, reflecting that his slowed-down pace was just about perfect for her relatively short legs. Bob had shoved a cane into his hands, which he carried in one fist like a spear. The crew members they passed tended to give him first a look, then a wide berth. Jessica wanted to laugh at them. Their own captain had been known to tear furiously through the corridors, although lately he had been working to do less of that; but the studied scowl of Captain Çelik was far more alarming than anything Greg ever expressed publicly.

Çelik must have caught her look, because he slowed his pace a little and tried to arrange his features into something less horrifying. “How long have you served on Galileo, Commander?”

If he had read anything about her at all, he would know. “Almost seven years, sir.”

“Did you want the job?”

“Yes, sir. I beat out sixteen people for it.”

She felt him glance at her. “Selection is blind, Commander. You couldn’t have known how many you were competing with.”

Shows what you know, she thought. “Given my background, sir, I think you’ll find you’re mistaken.”

“So you cheated.”

“No, sir.”

“You broke the law.”

That was closer. “Technically, sir, yes.”

“And Foster hired you anyway?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even knowing you could have fabricated your own history.”

Greg had offered her the position, and after her enthusiastic acceptance, he had taken the discussion off the record and told her that if he ever caught her falsifying records or using privileged information for fraudulent reasons, he’d have her thrown in jail. Youth and inexperience had made her more angry than frightened. I don’t need to fake my talents, sir, she had told him stiffly.

He had laughed.

“Captain Foster is almost as good as I am, sir,” she said. “He would have known if I’d hacked the records.”

“You have a strange sense of ethics, Commander. I could have used someone like you on Exeter.”

Jessica absorbed the odd sensation of being complimented and insulted at the same time.

There was too much ambient noise in the pub for the sound of Çelik’s artificial foot to be detected, but she was surprised it took so long for people to feel his presence. He filled the doorway, and as she stood to one side of him, she felt him change: he straightened, and all of the rage and frustration he had been radiating turned to calm confidence. She felt the hair on the back of her neck go up as the room slowly fell silent. He stood still for a moment, then walked past her to approach the bar, effortlessly becoming the center of gravity in the room. That, she thought, is not a thing you learn. It’s a thing you are.

Çelik stood steadily on both feet, one real, one artificial, hands behind his back closed over the cane. His eyes moved from face to face, one at a time; she could see in their reactions that they felt the personal touch. “I’m glad,” he said, his voice carrying effortlessly through the big room, “to see all of you.

“And I know you, like me, are thinking of our comrades who are not with us. Who were lost in this act of war against our ship, against our government. They fought with bravery and strength, as we all did. Every one of us. Why they were lost and we were not—” He broke off, and his next words were quieter. “There is no answer to that question. But I will tell you this: every one of you must take pride in how you responded today. Every one of you stood up, and did your duty, and so much more. I am proud to have been your captain today, as I am every other day. And I am humbled, constantly, by your focus, your talent, your dedication.

“We fought together. We fought bravely. We fought with strength and courage. We lost comrades, and that is a tragedy we cannot reverse. But we have not lost this war. Thanks to our allies aboard Orunmila and Galileo, we will find the enemy. We will thwart their plans. We will ensure that they will never again attack a Corps starship, that we will lose no more of our people. They will understand—completely and irrevocably—what fools they were today. What they have taken from us we will take from them a hundredfold. Why? Because we are strong. We are united. And we will not fail.”

Cacophony followed this speech as he was rushed by his crew, clapped on the shoulder, offered drinks, salutes, and handshakes. None of them, Jessica noted, seemed to register his prosthetic at all. For her part she hung in the corner, away from the throng, aware of an atmosphere that was close to hysteria. It had been a rousing speech, hitting all the right notes of nationalism and revenge.

She might have fallen for it herself had she not just spent ten minutes explaining to him that he probably had a traitor in his crew.

Without a word to anyone, Jessica slipped out the door and left him to his subterfuge.

CHAPTER 12

A nd to think I was actually worried about him.

Elena watched from the entrance to the pub as Çelik lifted a glass, surrounded by his usual crowd of acolytes. He said something she could not hear, and they all laughed uproariously as he drank. He had not changed at all, apparently, not in the nearly eight years since she had worked for him.

Not that she flattered herself that she knew him. She did not think anyone could truly know a man like him. She was not sure there was anything genuine in there for anyone to touch.

She could not, from this angle, see the prosthetic, although she spied the cane Bob had told her about lying on the bar behind him. Bob had tried to talk her down from her anger: “However he acts, Elena, he’s in considerable pain right now. That’s not going to improve anyone’s disposition.”

She did not have to ask Bob why he had let Çelik leave.

“He is DEFCON-1 pissed off,” Jessica had told her, catching Elena in the hallway before she entered the pub. “But he’s thinking. Or at least he was, before they swarmed him after that speech. You think he believes his own bullshit?”

Elena hadn’t heard the speech, but she could imagine it. “No,” she said. “But I think he knows what they need to hear.”

Jessica’s eyes had narrowed then, and Elena braced herself for compassion. “What about you, Lanie?” she asked. “What do you need to hear right now?”

Elena inhaled, exhaled, smiled. “Mostly,” she said, “that you’ll stick with me when I finally have a fucking meltdown over all this.”

Jessica had reached out and rubbed Elena’s elbow, and for one moment she had thought about falling into her friend’s arms and sobbing until she couldn’t feel anything anymore. Instead she had put her hand over Jessica’s and squeezed, then let her go.

She nudged her way through the crowd of men and women around Çelik, avoiding their eyes. The man himself watched her over his glass, gaze shrewd and sober. When he was off-duty, she recalled, he often had a drink in his hand, but it was usually the same one over several hours. She was not convinced she had ever seen him drunk.

He waited until she was directly in front of him. “Something I can help you with, Commander?” he asked easily.

Just like that, the others fell silent, waiting, and she felt her annoyance deepen. He was always surrounded by toadies, and she had never understood the appeal. He was one of the brightest people she had ever known; she had no idea why he wasted his time with such obvious gestures. “I’d like a word in private, Captain,” she said.

Behind her someone snickered. She ignored it.

But Çelik, as he always had, took her seriously. “Leave us alone, please,” he said, and the others dissipated like so much smoke. He waited until they were gone, then took a sip. “Still brimming with judgment, I see. How’ve you been, Shaw? Managed to recover from your lousy career move?”

It took more resolve than she liked to admit to keep from arguing with him. She had argued enough at the time, albeit from a much more vulnerable position. He had thought moving to Galileo was a choice to take the path of least resistance. She had agreed with him. Where their opinions differed was on exactly what resistance she was avoiding. He had refused for nearly six weeks to sign off on her transfer request, but in the end, the reference he gave to Greg was not only honest, but complimentary. Çelik could be spiteful, but he was never unprofessional.

“May I speak with you candidly, Captain? There are some things I’d like to ask you that may seem rather blunt.”

“Are there now?” He smiled, harsh and humorless, and his eyes grew hard. “And why on earth should I recognize your authority to ask me questions?”

Eight years later, and he was using the same tactics: rigidity and intimidation, but only when she hit a nerve. “Because we’re on the same side. For now.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Planning some more insubordination? In your shoes, I might give that a rest for a while.” He shrugged, and sipped. “Speak as candidly as you like, Commander. Why the fuck do I care?”

At least I’ve made him curious. “Why were you transporting Niall MacBride?”

He did not look surprised that she knew. “That’s classified. But I’m guessing you know that, or you wouldn’t be so pissed off.”

“He wouldn’t even have been arrested if it wasn’t for me,” she told him.

“So I understand. By the way, I found it fascinating that he ended up losing his career for not killing people, while you managed to stay on your feet after—what did they call it? ‘Unauthorized equipment damage’? I love military understatement, don’t you?”

Privately, she did not disagree with him. MacBride could have followed orders and made his life much easier; instead, he did the right thing. “Why did they take him, sir?”

His eyes slid away from hers. “How the fuck should I know?”

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Do you think it matters to anyone what you believe?” He turned back to her, his eyes bright and piercing. “Why does it matter, anyway?” he asked, curious. “What is MacBride to you, except the guy that took the heat for you?”

“It matters,” she replied deliberately, “because he’s the reason you were hit. And you know it.”

He watched her for a moment, eyes still bright; and then he relented, leaning one elbow on the bar. “Yes,” he said, suddenly serious, “I do know it. And whether he was kidnapped or rescued, it’s my responsibility, Commander. Not yours.”

It crossed her mind, then, that he might be trying to do her a kindness. Along with all of his less pleasant personality traits, he had always had a streak of military honor—a calculated form of chivalry—that surprised her. For an instant she looked at him and saw beyond his abrasive persona to a man, nearly fifty years old, body badly injured, psyche nearly mortally wounded. His rank, his patriotism, his loyalty to his command chain would seem like lifelines right now. And she could respect that.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.