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Chryse was the last thing Greg would have expected Taras to bring up with a Central Corps starship captain. And that, somehow, was more unsettling to him than nukes on Yakutsk.
Chryse was Meridia’s sister ship, and was known throughout the Six Sectors as the most insular, least communicative PSI ship currently in service. Greg himself, patrolling the same sector as Chryse, had only spoken with them twice in his entire career. They had been polite enough, and scrupulously efficient, but it seemed clear that Chryse preferred their relationship with Central to be distant. “Of course, Captain,” he told Taras, struggling to remember Chryse’s current location. “She’s out by the Third Sector border right now, isn’t she?”
“Actually, Captain, she is headed for Yakutsk.”
“As support?”
“One might presume that.” Greg detected sarcasm. “But we did not ask for support. More curiously, she’s sent us her first officer, Commander Ilyana, whom we also did not ask for, ahead in her own shuttle. Ilyana is in the field, half a day ahead of Chryse, and answers every attempt at contact with nothing but an automated telemetry ping verifying that her mission status is green.”
It hadn’t occurred to him that Chryse might be as secretive with her sister ship as she was with Central. “Have you contacted Captain Bayandi directly?”
“Oh, certainly.”
“And he hasn’t explained any of this?”
“Bayandi,” she said archly, “does not explain, Captain Foster. Bayandi is extremely pleasant at all times. He remembers my birthday, and the birthdays of all of my officers, and never fails to ask after my health. But he is evasive like no one I have ever met, and I include all of your Corps officers on that list.”
Bayandi, Greg recalled, had been Chryse’s captain longer than Greg had been alive. “Respectfully, Captain Taras—do you think he may just be getting old?”
“I cannot know.” She sounded frustrated. “I have been focusing on Yakutsk, and to have Chryse cheerfully deciding to participate without coordinating with us first—I am perhaps more tense than I ought to be. And …” She paused. “You understand, Captain, that it is not my instinct to trust the Corps with this information. You, however, are an individual, and I have always found you to be honorable.”
He had tensed as soon as she said and. “What’s happened, Captain?”
He heard a puff of air, as if she were preparing herself for an ordeal. “Four months ago, Chryse went dark for four days. We thought, at first, that they were hit by that same loopback virus that’s been flitting around. The one that hit you a few years back. But when they came back on line, they said nothing. We had to comm them to ask what had happened, and all we got was Commander Ilyana telling us politely that everything was fine.”
Four months. “You think this may be related to the equipment failures.”
Four months ago, the colony of Odisha had lost one of their polar terraformers. There had been a freighter in the area with replacement parts, and a number of PSI ships able to provide food and staples until the pole was stabilized, but as soon as Greg saw the hardware report on the equipment he knew what had happened. Ellis Systems, the manufacturer of the faulty part, had apologized and offered to provide a full replacement system at a substantial discount, and all was made well. But most people were unaware that Ellis, known galaxy-wide for commercial environmental equipment, was also developing weapons.
That had been the moment Greg had realized how far his own stature within the Corps had fallen. Despite applying all of his considerable powers of persuasion—despite knowing there were people within the Admiralty who knew as well as he did that Ellis was capable of using micro terraformer failures as a type of weaponry—he could not convince his chain of command to suggest to Odisha that they avoid anything manufactured by Ellis. It had been on Odisha that he and Captain Taras had forged something of a personal alliance: she knew, via her PSI channels, what Ellis had been up to, and she told him that the Fourth Sector PSI ships would keep an eye on Odisha’s new terraformer.
That was almost enough for Greg to forget how helpless he had become.
Since Odisha, there had been thirty-seven suspicious equipment failures that Greg knew of, some of which were catastrophic. Galileo had been deployed to respond to fourteen of them. But only twelve cases had provided enough data to prove—or suggest strongly—that Ellis-specific equipment was involved.
Privately, Greg had no doubt it was all of them.
“Impossible not to be suspicious,” Captain Taras agreed. “Chryse was at Odisha a few weeks before the polar issue. It’s possible she picked something up there, either that ugly loopback virus or some other malicious system worm. All I know is that they’re being entirely themselves and telling me nothing, and I’m rather tired of it. Would you be willing to talk to them, Captain? It would certainly send a different message.”
Greg was not entirely sure how to interpret that. “You want me to threaten them?”
Taras laughed. “Oh, goodness, Captain Foster. Chryse wouldn’t see you as a threat. But if you can get them to talk to you—it might clarify for them that they’re a bit farther off-grid than usual, and might want to take a little time to catch the rest of us up.”
He set aside, for a moment, the potentially troublesome thought that Chryse wouldn’t see Galileo as a threat. “So you’d like me to ask them if they need help, and let them know you’re concerned, and maybe see if I can get them to contact you with more details?”
“It sounds like I’m asking you to mediate a family squabble, doesn’t it, Captain?”
He did not believe Taras would involve him in something she thought was that petty. “I’m happy to be helpful, if I can, Captain Taras. I’ll let you know what Chryse says.”
“Thank you, Captain Foster.” And she sounded as relieved as he had ever heard her.
Later, Greg stood under the shower, organizing his thoughts, letting the water pummel the muscles in his neck. He couldn’t avoid putting the conversation into his official report; her comm would be on record already, and his command chain would want to know what she had said. But because it was neither dangerous nor related to Galileo’s current mission, he was not obligated to contact the Admiralty immediately. Regardless of his diminished influence, one thing about the Admiralty remained consistent: it paid to stay free of the sticky tendrils of Corps bureaucracy as long as possible. If the entire issue came down to nothing but a single conversation with a PSI ship, they wouldn’t be interested anyway.
Even though it’s Chryse?
Chryse, he had to admit, was different. Chryse was enigmatic on an unprecedented level. Many Corps ships had interacted with Chryse’s officers, but information exchanges were almost nonexistent. Greg had believed on some level it was because Meridia was so uncharacteristically open, and Chryse was going for balance. But the Corps abhorred opacity in anyone but themselves, and in PSI specifically. Even the most benign information on Chryse would be treated as important intel.
He rinsed off rapidly. “Galileo, how far are we from Yakutsk?”
“Three hours.”
He frowned. “How long was I running?”
“Two hours, four minutes.”
No wonder I ache. He shut off the water and reached for his clothes.
His friends often accused him of running to escape, to avoid the difficult things in his life; but in reality he couldn’t remember a time in his life when he didn’t run. His earliest memories were of sunrises by the beach, running along the ocean with his mother, his feet getting bogged down in the wet sand. She, with her longer legs, would run ahead, and then loop around to catch him from behind, sometimes sweeping him off his feet, sometimes diving into the ocean and holding out her arms, daring him to jump in after her.
But he didn’t, not often. Greg didn’t like to swim. Greg liked to run. And as often as he ran to stop thinking, he ran to ruminate, to have a space where he could turn everything over in his head when nobody would interrupt him or ask him to make a decision. Running allowed him to be alone, and these days, the moments in which he was alone were the only ones when he did not feel loneliness.
He wondered, now and then, if he should not be so used to loneliness.
He had just discarded his towel after one final pass over his short-cropped black hair when footsteps intruded on his thoughts. He looked up to find Gov’s assigned diplomat: Admiral Josiah Herrod, retired, who nodded when Greg caught his eye. “Good evening, Captain.”
“Good evening, Admiral.” Herrod, despite his nearly eighty years, was barrel-chested, sturdy, and imposing—and, Greg reflected, possibly the only person on board Galileo lonelier than Greg was himself. That was not because nobody knew Herrod, of course. It was because they knew him quite well—and thoroughly disliked him.
But nobody disliked him as thoroughly as Greg.
“Did it help?” Herrod asked him. “The running?”
Greg had, at first, assumed that Herrod’s assignment to the mission on Yakutsk was a thinly veiled threat. Before his retirement, Herrod had not only been highly placed within the Admiralty, but had been part of the Admiralty’s unofficial intelligence unit, Shadow Ops. Greg had learned years ago that Shadow Ops sometimes utilized methods that Greg—and, he hoped, most people with any soul at all—found reprehensible. He had never been clear as to whether or not Herrod condoned all of their methods, and the admiral had indeed helped Galileo from time to time; but he had also been part of the committee that had taken Greg’s chief of engineering from him, and Greg was disinclined to forgive.
But he had learned over the weeks that the man had some diplomatic skill, and Greg had grudgingly concluded that there was a good possibility he had been assigned because he was the best person for the job. In fact, he had more than once wondered why Herrod had not been sent to the Fifth Sector, where Central’s relationship with the wealthy Olam Colony was becoming increasingly strained. But Herrod’s combination of tact and bluntness had been keeping Yakutsk’s governors at the table longer than Greg would have thought possible. And for the sake of the mission, Greg could be satisfied with the knowledge that Herrod knew exactly why—and how much—Greg blamed him for everything that had happened over the last eighteen months.
“It did, thank you,” Greg lied.
Herrod pulled off his jacket and hung it on the wall. It was black, like an Admiralty uniform, but unadorned with piping of any kind. On Herrod, any jacket would look like a uniform. “Used to run,” the old man offered. “Found it inefficient. Too much time in my own head.” He cocked an eye at Greg. “Suppose that’s why you like it.”
“Suppose so.” Greg shifted; he was no good at small talk, even with people he liked. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”
Herrod’s dark eyes grew amused. “I’m not an officer anymore,” he pointed out. “Your time is your own.” But he relented with a nod. “I’ll see you in a few hours, Captain Foster.”
Greg headed for his office, annoyed, feeling he had been bested in a way he did not understand.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_eda7a875-ce1b-551e-93ef-0a1c8b288d1e)
Yakutsk
In the years when Galileo patrolled the Fourth Sector, Elena had been on Yakutsk more than two dozen times. Baikul, the dome facing the luminous green gas giant Lena, attracted some light tourism—she suspected the doomed terraformer project had been their idea—but she had spent all her time in Smolensk, the dome facing the stars. Smolensk was serviceable and unadorned, without hotels or restaurants oriented to off-worlders, but Elena had always enjoyed it. There was an efficiency to the place and its people, a cheerful fuck you aimed at anyone who expected any non-transactional deference. Elena had received no respect for her Corps contacts, but her knowledge of machinery and her straightforward negotiation for the parts she needed had made her solid professional allies, if not friends.
She had seen some vid of the moon’s temporarily terraformed surface. It had been beautiful: heavy on low-growing flowers and rudimentary crops, with habitats built by the wary colonists slowly beginning to spread. The atmosphere, produced by the terraformers and secured by an artificial gravity field designed to keep the solar winds from sweeping it out to space, had turned the sky a lilac-tinged blue, touched here and there with carefully regulated rain clouds. It had the look of a beginning, a seedling, the start of something that might someday become more substantial. Early days on many planets were beautiful and full of promise, but Elena had seen enough terraformed worlds to have a sense of Yakutsk’s fragility.
When the terraformers had failed, she had spoken with Jessica. They both agreed it was most likely Ellis Systems behind the catastrophe. But in truth, she would not have been surprised to find it a simple equipment overload. That the colonists had been prepared enough to maintain the domes, never mind make it back before the entire surface became uninhabitable again, suggested they had never quite believed it would all work. Smolensk, at least, was probably glad enough to see the terraformers go. In addition to ordinary building and repair services, Smolensk had thrived on selling parts found among the debris that was constantly falling on the moon’s surface. The atmospheric controls in the terraformers would have deflected much of that supply source, and Smolensk’s profits would have taken a hit.
It was no wonder the domes were at each other’s throats again.
Between the diplomatic reports and what Jamyung had told her, Elena expected a level of chaos in Smolensk. Budapest stocked no hand weapons, so none of the crew were armed. The best Elena had been able to do was make sure she, Bear, and Chiedza were all dressed in vacuum-ready env suits, hoods easily accessible in their pockets, as prepared as they could be for physical attack or attempted ejection from the dome. Even as they brought much-needed food supplies, she expected suspicion and threats, or worse.
But when they reached the colony, Elena found her fears had been misplaced. Smolensk was not chaos. It was a ghost town.
She stood next to Bear as he talked to the import official, with Chiedza behind her double-checking the supplies they’d brought against Yakutsk’s intake list. Through the windows of the small depot, she could see the city’s normally crowded streets were nearly empty. Not that they weren’t lived in—all the walkways were covered in Yakutsk’s ubiquitous red dust and littered with footprints—but she saw only three people walk by in the ten minutes she stood next to Bear.
She had seen Smolensk during political coups, a strange hybrid of anarchy and brisk commerce. She had seen drinking and fighting next to mundane business transactions. She had never seen it empty.
“I’ll need to verify this with the company,” the official said. He didn’t seem afraid, Elena noticed, but he was irritable. Ordinarily, Smolensk-level irritable. Nothing to fear?
So where is everybody?
She looked over at Bear. “When are we leaving?”
He shot her a look. It had taken her some time to convince him to let her go look for Jamyung. This might not be the Corps, she thought, but he still wants me to know he’s pissed off at me. “Three-quarters of an hour,” he told her. “Do not be late, Shaw. If you are, we’re leaving you behind.”
She headed out into the city, keeping her hand over the folded suit hood in her pocket. Realistically, she knew it was a useless precaution. If someone wanted to throw her out of the dome, they would certainly think to divest her of her hood first.
She thought of Jamyung’s vacated scout and deeply missed the little snub-nosed handgun she used to carry on missions in the Corps. She clutched the hood more tightly.
She had not seen Jamyung in more than two years, but she recognized the shop from a distance: prime real estate, not five minutes from the port, a nondescript and windowless gray building, surrounded by a massive vacant lot filled with piles of junk. Neat piles, of course: battery parts in one corner, nanopolymers in another, carefully insulated crates containing logic core pieces, and one massive bin of conduit and connectors. When she had first seen it, it had seemed like a candy store, but nothing kept outside was particularly valuable. All of Jamyung’s specialty parts were inside, in a locked basement vault that was as large as the lot itself.
She rapped on the door. “Jamyung?” she called, and tried the wall panel. The door slid open—unsurprising; these were business hours—but the lights were off. She frowned, leaving the door open behind her, and pulled a pin light out of her tool kit, illuminating the space with cool gray. The room was typically Spartan, containing only Jamyung’s desk and a chair; but the desk was askew, revealing the trapdoor to the basement vault. He had opened it—or someone had broken in. She stepped over, uneasy, and blinked into the darkness. If he was down there, he was too far afield for her to see his light. “Jamyung?” she called. Her voice slapped flatly in the low-ceilinged space.
“He’s not here.”
She started and turned, her hand going to her hip for her nonexistent weapon, then relaxed. Clearly this was one of Jamyung’s scavengers: short, slim, dark-haired, beige-skinned, and dressed in brown—deliberately nondescript. Dark eyes blinked at her, neither pleased nor bothered.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked.
“Dead.”
The bottom dropped out of Elena’s stomach. “Dead. Are you sure?”
The scavenger nodded.
“What happened?”
“He got vacated.”
Shit. “What’s your name?” she asked; and then, as an afterthought, “I’m Shaw.”
“Dallas.”
She took the offered long-fingered hand; Dallas gripped her hand briefly and firmly, then let go. Polite, she thought, and professional, just like Jamyung. “Dallas, was his vacating part of the political nonsense that’s been going on here lately?”
A snort of near laughter. “Nah. Politicians didn’t care about Jamyung. He got tossed by strangers.” The scavenger waved long fingers at her.
“Like me?”
“Different from you,” Dallas elaborated, “but still strangers. Dressed like Baikul agents, but they hadn’t grown up in a dome.”
Damn, damn, damn. It seemed Jamyung had been right about the object after all. “Do you know where he is?”
A nod.
She checked the time: more than half an hour left. The least I can do is bring him in from the cold. “Can you show me?”
A shrug this time. “Easy enough to find him. He’s not going to get up and walk away.”
To Elena’s surprise, Dallas met her at the side airlock in a full env suit, tugging a low anti-grav pallet. Despite the lack of visible grieving, the scavenger had apparently already been planning to retrieve Jamyung’s body. She was not the only one, it seemed, who had developed some loyalty to the dead trader.
She secured her own hood and let Dallas walk ahead of her to open the door. It was a passive pass-through, like they used for the shuttle docks, with a short corridor used as a buffer rather than an atmospheric generator. She waited while the outer door opened, and together they stepped out into the bleak frigid darkness that was the surface of Yakutsk.
The sky above them was black and dusted with stars, but there was a tiny glowing lip of orange-yellow peeking over the moon’s horizon, diluting the severe night sky. The gravity was far lower than it had been inside the dome, and she gave herself a moment to adjust, gripping the edge of the doorway. Dallas was clearly used to it, however, stepping forward confidently, and Elena followed with slow and careful steps, growing accustomed to the bounce. The dome’s lower windows were unshielded, and cast artificial light partway onto the flat, dusty landscape; Dallas had turned on a headlight, and Elena pulled the pin light out of her tool kit.
“He’s close,” Dallas told her.
In fact, she saw them in the shadows, less than twenty meters ahead: bodies, perhaps two dozen, in a haphazard pile. Most of them, she noted, were still wearing env suits, although they were hoodless. Torture, then: keep them alive out here to think about it for a while, and then yank off the hood.
What has this place become?
But Jamyung had not been wearing a suit. She spotted his familiar flimsy overalls, the flat soles of the shoes that had always seemed too small for him. Approaching the body, she shone the light on his face: familiar, frozen, startled, dead.
Shit.
Behind her Dallas brought the pallet. “I’ll get his feet,” the scavenger said, and positioned the skiff next to the body. Elena walked around to Jamyung’s head and slid her arms under his shoulders. Light, here on the surface; probably light inside, too. Wiry and muscly, but never large. Barely as tall as Jessica.
“You’re my last hope here.”
Damn, damn, damn.
“On three,” she said, and counted. They lifted, and laid the body gently on the pallet. Dallas made an attempt to brush some of the red-brown surface dust off Jamyung’s overalls. Whether or not it was grief, it was at the very least respect, and Elena was glad of it.
Dallas pulled, and Elena flanked the skiff as they made their way back through the airlock. Caught by an unusual bout of claustrophobia, she tugged her hood off as soon as the corridor pressurized. She looked down at Jamyung; the ice that had frozen around his mouth and nose was already melting. “He won’t last long in this warmth,” she said.
“Got a place for him,” Dallas told her, and she nodded.
And then she noticed something.
Reaching out with a gloved hand, she slipped her finger behind Jamyung’s exposed right ear. He’d worn it on his right, she was sure; she had memory after memory of him querying his comm, telling her he was taking alternate bids on what she was buying, trying to drive up the price. She’d never fallen for his trick.
