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“She didn’t come right out and say that.”
“You think they’ve been compromised.”
“I think it’s not a possibility we can ignore.”
She shook her head. “Bayandi sounds … friendly.”
“He does.” Greg’s tone went dry. “Funny, isn’t it, that the first time we talk to the captain of such an isolated starship, he turns out to be so personable?”
“And the distress call, aimed just at you and me.” She was feeling increasingly uneasy. “I don’t suppose you could spare me a weapon.”
“According to regulations? No.” His lips set in a grim smile. “But under the circumstances, regulations can go fuck themselves.”
CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_c2adf84a-16c6-5994-9e7d-d200c5a4436d)
The Corps is not here as your personal army, Governor,” Greg told Villipova, “or to teach your people self-defense. We’re here to keep you from blowing each other up.”
Greg was seated at his desk next to Herrod, the two governors on vid before them, and Greg found himself grudgingly grateful for the older man’s presence. Herrod’s habitual emotional detachment worked well in diplomatic situations like this one, when Greg was tempted to abort the entire process and tell everyone involved to grow the hell up. Herrod’s reticence reminded Greg that practical diplomacy was less about making people shake hands than it was about holding people off of each other until frayed tempers managed to settle.
His own frayed temper included.
Villipova frowned. “It’s not possible for you to do that without taking sides,” she insisted. “Oarig’s people shot down that civilian transport. It’s his fault the food both of our cities need lies frozen on the surface.”
“We weren’t shooting down anything!” Oarig interrupted. “They were out there confronting your people, who were going to hoard it all for themselves! They—”
“That’s enough,” Greg snapped. God, this finger-pointing is tedious. “Gov sent us here to keep the two of you from doing this kind of shit to each other,” he told them. “And that means it stops now. You want to hash out who did what to whom—do it afterward, when your people have supplies and safe places to live again. On the other hand”—he felt Herrod’s eyes on him—“if you’re genuinely inclined to shoot down the people trying to help you, we are going to take sides, and it’s not going to be with either one of you. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
Oarig’s lips narrowed. Villipova just looked tired.
“So here’s what’s going to happen,” Greg told them. “You are going to clear all of your people off the surface. Once the crash site is clear, I’ll send down some infantry to help retrieve the remains of the cargo. They—not your people, on either side—will move the cargo into the cultivation dome. They will dispense supplies in precisely the same amounts to each dome.”
“Captain,” Oarig objected, “Baikul has far more people. We need—”
“You need,” Greg told him, “to make sure your people stand down. Because the second we get wind of either side doing so much as target practice, all humanitarian help will be suspended. We’ll drop the seed where it belongs, and we’ll be out of there. Understood?”
Oarig looked as if he might object again, but this time a look from Herrod took care of him. He nodded, and Villipova said, “Understood.”
When the comm ended, Herrod raised his eyebrows at Greg. “You think that’s going to work?” he asked.
“Why not? Being reasonable hasn’t brought them anything. They call us, looking for help, we get here and they ignore everything we say. I sincerely doubt Gov wants us to spend weeks here letting them jerk us around.”
“Not what I meant, Captain,” Herrod said easily. Everything was always easy with him these days, a marked contrast to the short-tempered officer Greg had served under for years. It set Greg’s teeth on edge. “I have no quarrel with your strategy. Only your optimism.”
He rubbed his eyes. He had not anticipated this day would go well, but it had gone so much worse than he had feared. “Commander Lockwood is pulling the infantry together,” he said. “We should be able to protect the cargo, if nothing else.”
“What about the civilians?”
“As soon as they start shooting,” Greg told him, “they’re not civilians anymore.”
Herrod’s eyebrows went up again, but he didn’t argue.
Greg waited until Herrod had left before comming Jessica. “What’s the state of the infantry, Commander?” he asked.
“Ready as always, sir,” she said.
He could hear it in her voice: she was still annoyed with him for sending Elena after the PSI shuttle. When he’d told her he couldn’t spare the infantry, she’d pointed out that fully half of Galileo’s 226-member crew were not infantry. “You could have sent a mechanic, or a pilot. You could have sent me.”
“You’re not combat-trained.”
She had sworn at him, and he had known better than to laugh. “I am combat-trained to the same degree that Elena is. Just like everyone else on this ship. And most of us know our way around piloting a shuttle, especially one of our own. How the hell is what you’re doing any different than Savosky using her for risky missions his own people can’t hack?”
It wasn’t the same thing at all. But he couldn’t figure out how to explain it to her, so he’d just ordered her to drop it. A temporary respite at best, and in the meantime, he could expect her to be short with him.
If he’d had the luxury, he’d have sent Elena after Cytheria in one of the big armored troop carriers. Instead, he’d given her Nightingale, a ship she knew, and small enough for him to give up without jeopardizing their Yakutsk mission. Herrod’s sleek new travel shuttle might have done well enough, but apart from its lacking Nightingale’s armaments, Greg would have had to explain why he wanted to borrow it. And Greg wanted, as long as possible, to hide their strange relationship with Chryse from a retired admiral who was probably still part of Shadow Ops.
Elena had balked, briefly, at the heavy plasma rifle he wanted to give her. “I’ll be on my own, after all,” she pointed out. “A hand weapon would be more than enough.”
“I wouldn’t send anyone into this mess with nothing but a hand weapon,” he replied. She’d given him a deeply skeptical look that was achingly familiar, and then lifted the gun effortlessly from his hands and slung it over her shoulder. She was still in her Budapest env suit, gray and utilitarian, still coated in dust and grime; but as she strode away from him toward Sparrow she looked as military as any other member of his crew.
She looked like she belonged.
Walking back to his office after seeing her off, he found himself unsettled and irritable, and it had taken him all those minutes to figure out what the problem was: from the moment he had seen her down on that moon, covered in compost, determined and furious and terrified for her crewmate, some knot he hadn’t realized was inside of him had relaxed, and he had felt more clearheaded than he had in a year. Which was unfair: she had chosen to leave Galileo, and she had chosen to resign her commission, guaranteeing he had no way of getting her back on board. He had understood her reasons and had even found them logical; but she had lied to him, back when they had first found out she was being transferred. They cannot separate us unless we let them, she had told him.
And then she had let them.
He did not have the luxury of getting mired in all of that right now. She would rescue Ilyana, she would leave with Budapest, and Yakutsk would find some kind of irritable peace. And he would figure out, once and for all, how to leave her behind.
“I want the infantry twelve-on, twelve-off,” he told Jessica. “No long shifts for anyone. We may need to call them all up together if the situation heats up before Meridia gets here.”
At that, her tone thawed a little, and she betrayed some of her worry. “Do you think it’s that bad?”
“I think when it goes it’ll go quickly.” He paused. “Jess—did you ever meet Commander Ilyana?”
“I don’t think so.” Jessica sounded thoughtful. “I’m sure I talked to someone on Chryse once or twice, but it would’ve just been a few words. Whether it was her or not I couldn’t say. Why?” He could almost hear her mind working. “Do you think they’d send us a ringer?”
That hadn’t been what was worrying him, but it was a good question. “I want everything we have on Ilyana,” he said. “As many images and reports as we can get. News, rumor, all of it.”
“You should ask Herrod.” The tone was back, but at least it wasn’t aimed at Greg anymore.
“You think he’d tell me?” He heard her scoff, and he thought he might be forgiven. “And when she gets here, Jess … I want her comms monitored, and I want a guard on her. Not a goon, but someone with sharp eyes. Taras can take her when Meridia gets here, but I don’t want Galileo at risk.”
“You’re thinking maybe rescuing her isn’t the best idea?”
“I’m thinking,” he told her, “that being kind doesn’t mean we have to be stupid.”
CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_4551d50e-1a68-5c7c-9e6b-3dd5f5fe1e8f)
How’s the kid?” Ted asked Jessica.
Jessica was seated in Ted’s office, her feet on his desk, going over the history of Commander Tatiana Ilyana. The easiest thing, as it turned out, had been to find her original name: Leslie Barrett Millar, born on Achinsk, reported as a runaway at seventeen after a history of run-ins with the police at government protests. What was more interesting than her early history, though, was the reason it was easy to find: the Admiralty had commissioned a similar search on Ilyana nearly twenty years ago. Greg, as it turned out, had been right to be concerned: the Admiralty, although lacking concrete proof, believed she was a fairly accomplished spy.
Of course, with PSI having been allied with Central almost without interruption for hundreds of years, she wasn’t sure why the Admiralty would be worried about a spy. She had been thinking, lately—as rumors swirled about colonies in the Fifth Sector wanting to shift the seat of Central Gov to their territory, leaving Earth in political limbo—that Central had wasted a lot of time over the decades worrying about PSI. PSI was often secretive, and certainly standoffish to a degree that Gov seemed to find puzzling. But in every instance that had mattered, Jessica had seen PSI step up and fight on the same side as Gov, the Corps, and the colonies.
Besides, she thought, thinking of Admiral Herrod, Central has plenty of accomplished spies of their own.
She looked up at Ted, who was leaning against one of the office’s windowed walls, his back to the open engine room outside. Ted never sat at his desk. Ever since he had been appointed chief of engineering, he had used the office, but never sat in the chair. He hadn’t said so, but she knew in his mind it was Elena’s. Of course, it might also have been Ted’s endless kinetic energy—he was not big on sitting at the best of times—but given how his teeth set every time someone called him Chief, she didn’t think that was the main reason.
“Stabilized, Bob says,” she replied. “If he were one of us, Bob would already have cut him loose. As it is, he wants to sit on him until Budapest has to leave.”
“So he’s worried.”
“I think cautious is probably more accurate.” Or, she thought, possibly territorial. For a cynical old man, Bob became deeply possessive of his patients, especially those who had been badly hurt. “If he was worried, he’d tell Bear to delay their next drop and stick around. I’m not so sure Bear won’t do it anyway.”
Ted was watching her curiously. “This kind of worrying familiar to you, Jessie?”
She met his eyes as neutrally as she could. “More than I’d like it to be,” she admitted. Ted knew her too well. “Ted, you’ve been around a bit.”
“You’ve been listening to gossip again, haven’t you?”
She ignored him. “Did you ever run into this Commander Ilyana?”
He shook his head. “Never dealt with Chryse directly,” he said. “But one of the guys I originally deployed with—he’s out on Borissova now—did an airlift with Chryse’s help. Said they were unbelievably well organized, but otherwise kind of rude.”
“Not surprising, PSI being PSI.”
“That’s why I remember him remarking on it. They must have been really unpleasant.”
Which was not unusual in isolation. But Jessica thought of Greg, and his reaction to Captain Bayandi. Greg was both curious and mistrustful of the man, and she did not think he would be so concerned if Bayandi had behaved with PSI’s typical coolness.
She shoved aside her research, giving Galileo a chance to digest more records. “Did you get anything on that artifact yet?” she asked.
For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to let her change the subject. But then he pushed himself off the wall and began to pace in front of her. “So what we’ve got there,” Ted told Jessica, “is an enigma.”
“Haven’t you scanned it?”
“Oh yes. I scanned it from every possible angle with everything we’ve got.” He shook his head. “It’s shielded. No matter what I point at it, I get a happy little NO DATA back from the system. So whatever it is, it’s got better tech than we have, which does not please me.”
It did not please Jessica, either. Better tech almost certainly meant Ellis.
“But the other side of it,” he added, “is that it didn’t actually do anything.”
Jessica raised her eyebrows. “What about Lanie’s message?”
“It’s not a message.” He leaned across her and hit a panel on the desk. A waveform appeared in the air, and he reached his fingers into the image and pulled it apart. “It’s an audio amalgam of comms she’s received and sent. There’s nothing original in there at all.”
Jessica got to her feet, walking around the waveform to stand at Ted’s side. “So it tapped into her comm and composed something from what it found.” She looked up at him. “Is it just me, or is that the opposite of not doing anything?”
“Well, okay, it’s not nothing,” he allowed. “But it’s not sophisticated, Jess. It’s basically an audio compositor that uses emphasis based on frequency. It’s a parlor trick. It’s the shielding that’s more interesting, and it’s possible even that’s just a variant of the loopback virus we hit a while back.”
She frowned. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew who was after it. Or how to use it.”
“I’ve got one more test I want to try,” he told her, “but I’ve been waiting for you, just in case I pass out or something.”
“You’re going to touch it.”
“Only way, Jess.”
“If it goes after you like it did Lanie—”
“I swapped my comm out right before you got here,” he said. “If it’s doing what I think it’s doing, it’s going to give me nothing but our conversation. And of course some lovely words from you about how wonderful I am.” He grew more serious. “You with me on this?”
She sighed and dropped her feet off the desk to stand. “I suppose I might as well watch the thing melt your brain.”
At that, he shot her a grin. “I live to serve.”
He led her to a small workroom. When he closed them into the space, she raised her eyebrows at him. He shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s a paranoia thing,” he told her. “It commed Lanie when she touched it, but if it’s got an interface that gets activated on contact, I don’t want to give it access to Galileo.This room is comms-locked.”
She looked around the small space. “What, always?”
“Sometimes we need a space where things can go wrong without broadcasting to the whole ship.”
The box containing the artifact was sitting on a table, next to a haphazard stack of spanners. “Is it safe to open?” she asked.
“The one thing I know,” he told her, “is that if there’s anything radioactive in there, it’s contained by whatever shielding it’s got.” He gave her a look. “You want to wait outside?”
She shook her head, and he opened the box.
The artifact was, she thought, about as anticlimactic as it could be. It was a flattened cube with rounded edges and corners, done in a gray polymer. If it had been sitting in a corner of the ship, she wouldn’t even have noticed it. Easy to camouflage, she thought. Easy to make someone pick it up without thinking.
Ted took a breath, extended a finger, and touched the cube.
After a moment he lifted his hand and touched it again, then laid his palm on the surface. He took it out of the box and held it with both hands, threaded it between his fingers, tossed it into the air and caught it again. He looked across at Jessica. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”
“I mean,” he said patiently, “I’m not getting anything, comms or otherwise, and monitoring is showing no signal.” He placed it back into the box. “If I hadn’t looked at Lanie’s comm myself, I’d have guessed she just hit some kind of random interference.”
Jessica frowned down at the artifact, suddenly ominous in its nondescriptness. “Is it possible that’s what happened?”
“Sure. But if it’s not this thing that scrambled her comm, there’s something roaming out in the wild doing it. Besides, she said Jamyung heard it, too, remember?”
She looked over at him. Something had occurred to her, but she didn’t want to share it yet. “Maybe it’s the comm,” she said. “Something Lanie’s and Jamyung’s had in common.”
“Maybe it doesn’t like the new ones,” Ted mused. “I could put my old one on and try it again.”
She shook her head. Regardless of the persistent inertness of the thing, risking Ted felt like an extreme response. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said. “There’s more we can find out without getting reckless. How thick is that inert polymer?”
“About half a centimeter.” He caught on to her thoughts. “You want to shave it, see if we get something stronger?”
