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Bear’s nose wrinkled. “Elena, what the hell am I smelling?”
Elena looked down at herself. Her once pristine env suit was covered in the red-gray dust of Yakutsk’s exposed surface, and her arms were caked up to her elbows with muck from the heap of organic material through which she had been digging for the last ten minutes. Her own nose had stopped working shortly after she started, and she was grateful; she didn’t think she could otherwise have done the job without getting sick.
“Compost,” she said. “Also, cat excrement. I think.”
“There some big reason we’re all going to have to sit with that on the way back to Budapest?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the container she had found buried in the garbage. “Jamyung’s dead,” she told him. “And this is what he left me.”
“He left it to you buried in cat shit?”
She tucked it back into her pocket. “It’s a long story,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
She had heard him shouting as she came up the road, his bellowing punctuated by barely audible, utterly unconcerned responses from the import official. When she arrived, the official was walking out the back door, the office itself dark.
Bear grew serious. “We’ve got two problems,” he told her. “First, they want the cargo dropped at the cultivation dome. Second, the Corps has intel suggesting Baikul wants to steal the cargo. I’ll leave the exercise of which is more important to the pilot.”
She raised her eyebrows. Since the population had moved back into the domes, everything on the surface was disputed territory. The cultivation dome itself was jointly held, but they would have to fly over a substantial amount of open landscape to get there, which would expose them to any ground-to-air fire Baikul chose to throw at them. Worse, the cultivation dome had no established infrastructure or procedures for docking a large-scale cargo ship. They would have to unload cargo without any environmental controls, doing all the work in env suits. They would be almost completely defenseless.
She felt a tingle in her spine. She had been trained for this.
“Let me fly it alone, Bear,” she said. When he looked away, she pressed her argument. “Out in the natural gravity, the size of those cargo crates isn’t going to bother me at all. I’ve got the training to fly this kind of mission.”
“Chiedza’s flown combat,” he said.
“Not like this.” Elena didn’t think the combat Chiedza had flown would have involved much defense. “There’s no reason to put everyone through this. Pull the extraneous crap from one shuttle, pack all the cargo on it, and I’ll take it out and be back within the hour.”
He was still frowning, but she could see it on his face: he knew this was his best choice. Curtly, he nodded. “No risks, though,” he added, unable to resist one last admonishment. “And no detours. You drop that fucking cargo and you get the fuck out. Understood?”
“Understood.” And for the first time in a year, she felt like she had a real purpose.
She hauled the extra seating out of one of Budapest’s two shuttles as Bear and Chiedza shifted their half of the cargo into her ship. It was snug, but they were able to fit it all in. She squeezed between the massive bins of grain and parked herself in the pilot’s seat, pulling on her env hood. When she landed, the fastest way to offload the cargo would be to vent the cabin and repressurize later, and she wanted to spend the briefest possible time on the surface.
She flew the great circle route over what passed for a pole, and was treated to an aborted sunrise as she maneuvered toward the side of the moon sheltered by the gas giant. The shuttle’s sensors swept as widely as they could, looking for movement and potential attackers. The mechanism had less scope than she was used to, but she comforted herself by realizing that the darkness on the dead surface would make it nearly impossible for a large group of people to conceal any guidance lighting.
Assuming, of course, that they needed lighting after a lifetime exploring the moon’s surface.
As she understood it, there were generally no more than five people living in the cultivation dome at one time: a botanical expert and a chemist, a single medic, and one or two horticulturalists, all ensuring the safety and nutritional value of what was being grown in the limited space. They would, she had been told, be expecting her, although she was anticipating they’d be nervous. Purges had been nearly nonexistent during the terraformer experiment; for the ordinary citizens, who had been just beginning to relax into a new life, this would be a jarring return to an uneasy past they had hoped to leave behind. Those were the people she thought of at times like this—not the dome officials, pointing fingers at each other, so caught up in paranoia that they would kill their own without a thought. Most of the people wanted nothing more than their old, comfortable lives back.
She thought of Jamyung, and tugged the container out of her pocket. It was vacuum-sealed, designed to freeze whatever was inside into inertness. Such an environment could wreak havoc on machine parts, but whatever this thing was, it had survived the moon’s surface, and the cold shielding would have made it more difficult to find using conventional scanners. Almost absently, she touched the opening mechanism and the lid lifted, revealing exactly what he had described: a cuboid, gray and smooth with rounded corners, its proportions squat and pleasing.
He died for this. Or believed he had.
Curious, she tugged off her glove and held her palm over it. She could not tell how warm it was, but after a vacuum seal, it should have radiated at least a little bit of cold. She frowned at it, and then, on impulse, she brushed one finger along the surface. It was warm, like skin, smooth and unyielding, and she wondered what kind of polymer it was. Something sophisticated, certainly, that could withstand such extreme temperatures. Or perhaps the polymer was encasing something, although Jamyung hadn’t mentioned that. He would have had it under a scanner, she was sure. Odd that he hadn’t—
Without warning, a signal came over her comm, a deafening jumble of sounds. Words, music, shouting, white noise, machines; she could not sort any of it out. There was a rhythm beneath it all, and it built, taking on melody, creeping into her mind, singing one word, over and over again: Galileo … Galileo … Galileo … louder and louder and—
There was a lurch, and an alarm, and she reached back to the controls, cursing. She should at least have put the damn ship on autopilot. She wrenched the shuttle back to level and heard her cargo slide, the crates knocking into each other.
And then someone said, “Ow!”
She turned, reaching instinctively for her nonexistent weapon. “Who the fuck is there?” she snapped.
“It’s only me,” Arin said. He crawled out from between two crates, rubbing his head. “Do you have to fly so rough?”
Shit. “Arin, what are you doing here? Did you have some fugue where you missed the bit where Bear told you to stay on Budapest?” At least, she observed, he’d had the brains to pull on an env suit.
“I’m here to help,” he insisted. “And don’t tell me you couldn’t use the extra hands.”
No, no, no. This was wrong. “No, Arin, I could not use the extra hands. Fuck.” She turned her back to him. The box had fallen to the floor. Hastily tugging her glove back on, she picked up the box and closed it, slipping it back into her pocket. “I need to do this alone so I don’t have to divide my concentration making sure you stay in one fucking piece!”
She caught sight of another energy signature and turned again. Behind her, she heard him stumble. “Well I’m here now,” he said. “What can I do to help?”
She should never have befriended him. She should never have befriended any of them. Fuck. “Get in a fucking seat,” she told him between gritted teeth, “and strap yourself down. You’ll do me no good if you fly into my head while I’m trying to land.”
Arin pulled himself into the copilot’s seat, fastening his harness, and her anxiety eased a little. At least he wouldn’t break his neck on the way down. She was fairly certain, though, she would break it for him once they got back to Budapest.
Right before Bear broke hers.
“What’s the plan?” he asked her.
“The plan is we get fifty meters from the cultivation dome,” she told him, “we drop the cargo, and we get the fuck out.”
“No verifying pickup?”
If she had been alone, she might have scanned for ships, set a beacon, commed them to make sure they knew where to look. “The import official agreed. We drop the cargo and we leave.” She shot him a glare; he was still grinning. Dammit, he wasn’t bothered at all. A Corps ensign would have had the brains to stop smiling and restrict all his responses to “Yes, ma’am” for the next six or seven years of his career.
Beneath them, she caught the distant lights of the cultivation dome—along with a much stronger energy indicator. Before she could dodge into the moon’s shadow again, the shuttle sounded a quiet alarm and said, “We are being targeted.”
Big fucking surprise. “Evasive!” she shouted, and keyed in a command to the ship’s autopilot. The energy pulse swept past them silently.
Beside her, Arin began unstrapping himself. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’ll get the cargo ready for the drop.”
“Arin—”
“I’m here, Elena. Let me help.”
Stupid. Damn kid. “You hook yourself onto the wall,” she told him, “and you keep your head away from the open door, do you understand? They will be firing on us. This isn’t make-believe. This is fucking war.”
She kept her eyes on their attackers as she heard him pull one of the attached lines out of the wall and hook it securely around his waist. She heard scraping as he began shoving the cargo to one side, exposing the ship’s side door. If she got low enough, she could open the door, and he could shove the containers out, one by one. Twenty seconds, tops. Maybe less.
“Two minutes,” she told him. “Stay behind those containers, dammit. Keep covered.”
But before she could steer them lower, the alarm came again. “We are being targeted,” the shuttle repeated calmly. On the tactical display, she could see the small lights moving toward them from three directions this time. Too many, and far too fast.
“Hang on, Arin!” she shouted, and took the controls back to manual. One of the shots would miss, she could see; the other two seemed to be homing in on them. Different firing systems, then; their attackers were neither experienced nor properly prepared. Which doesn’t mean their strategy won’t work. She watched the faster shot get closer and closer to them, and as it closed in, she rolled them abruptly to one side. She heard the containers shift, and the missile swept past them.
But the second detonated not thirty meters from their undercarriage, and they were suddenly pitched forward, nose toward the ground, the ship’s engines groaning as they attempted to compensate. “Arin!” she shouted.
“I’m okay!” he shouted back. “Elena, just get—”
They hit the ground nose-first, the front window slamming into the dirt, obscuring her visibility entirely. The harness kept her from dropping onto the ceiling as they skidded upside down through the frozen dust, far faster than they should have; the engines were whining, trying to soften the landing, and she thought they had been damaged. In an instant, though, the engines no longer mattered: they slammed against something she couldn’t see, she jerked roughly against her harness, and the engines shut down.
“Arin?” she said, unbuckling herself, her feet dropping onto the ship’s ceiling. “You still hooked in?”
There was silence, and everything in her went cold.
“Arin!” She rushed toward the containers. Where they had been carefully lined up on the floor they were now tossed about the ceiling like huge squares of confetti, on top of each other and in corners, a few broken open, seeds scattered. She saw the safety cable behind one of them and grabbed it, pulling; it resisted. She shoved at the container covering it; the heaviest of them was ninety kilos in this gravity. If she braced herself against the wall she should be able to shift it. Squeezing between the container and the wall, she positioned her feet and set her shoulders, then took a deep breath and shoved. The container slid reluctantly away from her, and fell off to the left.
Arin was crumpled against the wall, unmoving.
She rushed to him, careful not to shift him. She could see his chest rising and falling rapidly, and she felt a glimmer of relief. Where was the damn med scanner on this ship? Under a pile of containers, she realized; she would have to rely on her rusty field training. Pressing her gloved fingers against the thin fabric of his suit hood, she took the pulse in his throat; a little fast, but steady enough. She cleared the debris away from him, trying not to move him, unsure of where he had been hit and how hard. His nose was bleeding; it was clearly broken. As she was running her hands carefully along his arm, he stirred and groaned.
“Sit still,” she told him sharply.
“What,” he said.
“We’ve crashed,” she told him. “You got hit with a container. Be still; I don’t know how badly you’re hurt.”
He opened his eyes; both pupils, she noted, were even. His concussion couldn’t be too bad. “Why’d they shoot at us?” he asked, coherently enough.
“Because they don’t want us here.”
He looked confused. “We’re bringing them food.”
“We’re interfering in local politics.”
“Don’t they need us?”
Now was not the time for a lesson. “Lie still, Arin. I’m going to see who I can contact.”
She made her way back to the front of the ship and managed to pull up a rudimentary console. No comms at all, but the environmental controls were still on: air, temperature. They could breathe, at least.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t shoot, and she cursed. If she’d been running this mission off of Galileo, she would have been carrying a sidearm. There would have been half a dozen pulse rifles in the cargo hold, just in case. Fucking freighters.
They were lying here, upside down in the dirt, and they were helpless.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_fc679a67-9aa1-510f-b7d2-1ea54920d78c)
You don’t have to come, sir,” Greg had told Herrod. “I’m guessing there’s going to be more shouting and denials than discussion this time.”
Herrod had given him a familiar look of mild amusement. “Shouting and denials require diplomacy, too, Captain,” he had pointed out. “And while I may not be able to throw my weight around anymore”—here he gestured at Greg’s assembled security detail, eight armed soldiers of considerable size—“I can still sling a pulse rifle if the situation calls for it.”
Greg had the distinct impression Herrod was having fun.
In the end he had settled for a single platoon with two senior soldiers: Bristol and Darrow, both of whom he knew well, both of whom knew how to be unobtrusive when they needed to be. “With any luck,” he told the platoon, “this is a false alarm, and you’ll all be nothing more than pomp and circumstance. But keep your eyes open, and stay on your toes.”
He could have taken a pilot, or at least a cabin crew, but Greg was fond of flying, and as the ship’s captain he rarely got a chance to do it. Herrod had the good sense to settle himself in Sparrow’s passenger cabin instead of sitting copilot, so Greg had the space to himself. Sparrow was an easy shuttle to fly, smooth and responsive, and Greg almost never engaged the autopilot, even when it would have freed him up to do something else. He could watch the stars, see the moon advance through the front window, while keeping an eye on surface scans and nudging their direction now and then.
Almost as relaxing as running. He smiled.
Oarig had denied any plans to intercept the food drop. “Why would we interfere with a commercial shipment?” he asked, and Greg had no rational answer. He hadn’t pointed out that few of Oarig’s actions since his precipitous installation had made commercial sense. If Oarig was preparing some sort of ambush, it spoke of inexperience. The Admiralty had no intelligence on Oarig, but Greg was guessing, based on his appearance, that if he was more than twenty it was not by much. Not enough time to learn real politics, no matter how young he had started.
In contrast, Villipova, the governor of Smolensk, was a grim-faced woman of fifty-four, used to occasional violence, but reasonably skilled at dealing with corporations and trade. Greg had dealt with her under less stressful circumstances, and had found her unfailingly practical, if not prone to overtures of friendliness. During their negotiations she had seemed tired and irritable, and had struggled with letting Oarig speak his mind. She clearly thought the Baikul governor was foolishly inflexible, and much of Greg’s challenge had been getting her to listen long enough to understand the areas where Oarig was open to compromise.
When he had briefed Commander Broadmoor on the tactical situation, he had told her to expect both domes to be coordinating attacks on each other. “This attack may just be the start,” he’d said. “Keep the troop shuttles on deck, and your people ready to go. And if you detect anything more radioactive than a thorium mine—you alert me instantly, understood?”
Greg had no doubt Oarig would revel in Central sending infantry to Smolensk, but he doubted the governor would sit silent when Baikul received the same treatment. Greg’s orders to Emily Broadmoor had been clear: she was to deploy the others if—and only if—she thought a show of firepower was the only way to prevent the colony from blowing itself up.
They were still ten minutes out from the dome when Commander Broadmoor commed him. “Sir,” she told him, “we’re showing some activity on the surface. Pulse rifles, and what looks like a wreck.”
Here we go, he thought. “Any distress calls?”
“Hang on …” She was silent for a moment, then: “There’s a beacon, sir. It’s a cargo ship off of Budapest.”
Greg hit Sparrow’s comm. “Savosky?”
“This is Yuri Gorelik. Captain Foster, is that you?”
Savosky had not yet returned, then. “We’re getting a beacon from one of your shuttles down here. Looks like they got caught in some surface fighting. Are you in touch with them?”
“No, Captain, we’re not.” Gorelik sounded concerned. “Captain Savosky is on his way back right now. Shaw was supposed to be making the cargo drop.”
“On her own?” The question came out before Greg realized what he was asking. Of course Elena would have managed a way to do it on her own.
But that wasn’t what was worrying Gorelik. “She was supposed to be alone,” he said. “But it seems we’re missing our other mechanic. Arin Goldjani. Captain Foster—” There was a pause. “He’s nineteen. Not experienced. He was meant to stay here for this mission. We think he stowed away.”
He was also, Greg knew, Yuri and Bear’s adopted son. “Are you getting anything from them at all?”
“Just the beacon, as you are.”
Shit. “The colonists must have a local jammer,” he said. The alternative—that the crew could not respond—was unthinkable. “Your cargo ships don’t carry weapons, do they?”
“No, Captain.” Gorelik’s voice was grim. “They do not.”
Greg was changing course even as he commed Jessica. “Commander, get in touch with Oarig and tell him if he’s got anything to do with shooting at fucking civilian freight ships trying to bring his own people fucking food, this is no longer going to be a neutral negotiation.”
Jessica got the point quickly. “Is it Elena?”
“Of course it’s Elena. And apparently some green kid who followed her down.”
Jessica swore concisely. “On it, sir.”
Admiral Herrod appeared at his elbow. “Problem, Captain?”
“We need to divert, sir,” Greg said. “Someone shot down a cargo carrier. They’ve put up a distress beacon, but Budapest can’t contact them.”
