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“Go ahead,” Greg said from the pilot’s cabin.
Bear picked up almost immediately. “Shaw? What the fuck? Have you got Arin?”
“He’s here,” she said. “He’s safe. We’re headed back to Galileo.”
“Fuck Galileo,” Bear snapped. “You need to get your ass back here. Did you drop those supplies?”
“He’s injured, Bear.”
Bear went silent for a moment. “How bad?”
Even with her isolated existence, Elena knew the tone: the stomach-knotting fear of a parent too far from a sick child. “He’s talking,” Greg interceded. “He was steady as a rock out there.”
“I’m fine,” Arin said, trying to sound reassuring.
But Bear didn’t want their reassurances. “Elena?”
“He’s got a concussion,” she said, “and I think a ruptured spleen. But the internal bleeding is under control. We’ll be back on Galileo in—” She turned to meet Greg’s eyes.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “I’ll have a med crew waiting. We’ll look after him, Savosky.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Bear said, and terminated the comm.
Elena cursed, and Arin spoke up. “Listen, Lanie, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to him. It’ll be fine.”
“Sit still,” she said shortly, and Arin fell silent again, his expression closing. Dammit, she’d hurt his feelings again. He did not understand.
How could he? He’s just a kid.
Who you nearly got killed.
She looked up. Herrod was watching her, his black eyes unreadable. She hadn’t seen his face in a year and a half, and he looked older than she remembered. Much older. She did the math in her head: he’d be seventy-nine now. She supposed some years were harsher than others.
Not that he didn’t deserve it.
She glanced behind her to where Bristol and Darrow were sitting with the others. Bristol blanched, his pale skin communicating his feelings without words, and she nearly smiled. She’d always intimidated him. She wasn’t entirely sure why. He was older than she was, and much bigger; but she had to admit he’d annoyed her fairly often, and she’d let him know it. Some people seemed to find her annoyance frightening. When she had been in the Corps, that had been useful.
Rebecca Darrow gave her a friendly nod. “Good to see you, Chief,” she said.
I’m not Chief anymore, Elena thought; but she didn’t correct her. “You too, Becky,” she said. Darrow hadn’t changed: tall, sturdily built, straight jet-black hair, smooth, gold-tan skin without anything resembling a line or blemish. She would look the same at sixty as she did now. After eighteen months away, Elena found the effect unnerving: it would be so easy to tell herself it had all been an illusion, from the transfer to her resignation to this awful day.
Just like Becky Darrow, Greg had not changed. He had stormed in—unasked, as usual—and she had fallen into step with him as if they had never been apart. That had been, she had realized since she left the Corps, one of the foundations of their friendship: they strategized the same way. In the field, in a crisis, their communication was fluid and efficient: no arguments, no power struggles, just solutions. She had always liked working with him, because he made sense. She had been startled as hell the first time she’d learned not everyone felt the same.
She tugged off her hood and smoothed the damp strands of hair out of her eyes. “Can you guys watch him?” she asked Bristol and Darrow. When they nodded, she climbed to her feet and headed for the front of the cabin. This was not the place for their long-overdue conversation, but that wasn’t the only conversation they needed to have.
She slid into the copilot’s seat and looked over at Greg. She wasn’t sure why she had expected him to look different; a year was not so much time. He was still tall, still slim, still square-jawed and flawlessly handsome, still striking with his bright gray and black eyes against his dark skin. Even his hair was the same, cropped so close he was nearly bald. She had asked him, once, why he kept it so short, and he’d said, “Because I like how it feels when I have to slap my head in frustration.” Then he had laughed, and she had never been sure his answer was serious.
She could tell he knew she was looking at him. Years ago, before things had become strange between them, he would have asked her what was wrong. Maybe he doesn’t care anymore, she thought, and was hit by a wave of unexpected loneliness. She had to take a moment to swallow it away.
“Thank you,” she said, “for coming after us.”
“Dumbass place for a cargo shuttle,” he remarked.
“We don’t make the drop, we don’t get paid.”
“In a case like this, maybe it’s a fair trade.” He paused. “Are you guys going to get stiffed on this one?”
“Bear said the import officer told him as long as the cargo was close enough to the cultivation dome for them to retrieve it, he’d sign off.” She sighed. “I don’t know if we’re going to get stiffed. Our accountant will fight that fight. If we don’t get the money, she’ll have to figure out another way to make up the shortfall.”
“So your accountant is a magician.”
Elena thought of Naina, scrupulously honest, dissecting every financial loophole available for the company that employed her. “Yeah, she kind of is. Listen, Greg.” That got his attention. “I want to ask a favor.”
She half expected him to summarily eject her from the shuttle for her nerve, but he just said, “Okay.”
“Do you remember Jamyung, the trader we used to buy parts from?”
He did, and she told him the story, from the comm she had received earlier that day, to arriving in Smolensk to find Jamyung murdered, to Dallas’s story of the strangers who killed him. “But that’s not the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is this … thing he left for me. This artifact. I thought he was bullshitting when he said it talked to him, but it talked to me, too.”
At that he frowned, that familiar formidable scowl, and she knew then he was focused on the problem. “Show me.”
She took the box out of her pocket, and he raised his eyebrows at her. “I should probably have tossed it,” she admitted. “But … there’s something about it. I can’t really explain.”
He took it from her and opened the box. As he stared at the artifact, his expression eased into curiosity. She wondered if, as she did, he found it beautiful. “His scout found this on the surface? What was it a part of?”
“No idea.” He reached out a finger, and she held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t do that. That’s when it talked to me, when I touched it.”
His eyes locked with hers. “What did it say?”
“That’s …” She struggled to explain the message. “It was nonsense, really. Overlapping voices, noises, rhythm. And then, emerging from the static, one word. Galileo. Over and over again.”
She hadn’t wanted to tell him, but somehow he had seen it in her face. “It affected you,” he realized, and she nodded.
“It left me feeling … lonely, I guess. And really disoriented. I almost crashed us without the help of those attackers. Greg, if it’s some kind of a weapon …”
“Not much of a weapon if you have to touch it first.”
“Maybe it’s a prototype.”
“That will evolve into a non-contact weapon?” He kept frowning at the artifact, but when he reached out to close the box, she thought he was reluctant. “What’s the favor?”
“I don’t have anything on Budapest sophisticated enough to scan something like that,” she told him. “I was wondering if Ted could look at it. Galileo’s deep scanners would give us soup to nuts on what it’s really doing.”
He nodded. “Of course. I’ll pass it on.” He looked back at her. “You said this came in over your comm? Can you give me a copy of the message?”
That should have been an easy question to answer. She should have sent him over a copy without hesitation. If it had been Greg alone … but she thought of Ted, and the open engineering floor, and all those soldiers, some of whom she didn’t even know, listening to her message. Galileo … Galileo … Galileo …
“Can you promise me,” she asked, “that nobody but you and Ted, and maybe Jessie, will listen to it?”
Anyone else would have demanded an explanation. Anyone else would have told her she was being unreasonable, it was not important, it was just a random impersonal comm. Anyone else would have made her feel foolish for her reticence; after all, this thing was potentially a weapon, and they needed to understand it, no matter how private the message.
But all Greg said was, “You have my word.”
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_7eca7b8b-5521-5286-8b4b-aee4c2749946)
Galileo
Jessica hissed through her teeth when she saw Sparrow enter the landing bay. The little shuttle had taken hits—a few bad ones, too—which meant Greg had been hot-rodding again. He had no business doing that. He should have brought more infantry with him, and a larger arsenal. He should have taken something with armor. He shouldn’t have risked himself in the first place for fifteen thousand tonnes of grain and a freighter shuttle.
Which wasn’t really what he’d done—she knew exactly why he had risked himself—but she was still angry with him.
Greg stuck his head out of the shuttle door and waved Bob’s people in. The medics stepped inside, and Greg climbed out, followed by Bristol, Darrow, and the others, and finally Admiral Herrod. Jessica stood at strict attention and saluted; Greg returned the gesture, but Herrod just gave her an amused look.
“What have we got, Commander?” Greg asked her. Formal. Whether that was for Herrod’s benefit or the infantry’s, she wasn’t sure.
“I’ve had both Oarig and Villipova pissing in my ear since you deployed troops at the wreck, sir,” she told him. It had mostly been Oarig, but she felt obligated to give the two recalcitrant politicians equal responsibility. “They’re accusing each other of destroying the cargo, and they’re both threatening to send troops to the cultivation dome.”
Her captain rubbed his eyes. “The cargo’s not destroyed,” he told her. “How many troops are we talking about, Jess?”
He knew the intelligence as well as she did. “Between standing militias and official security people? About twenty-three hundred in Smolensk, and another fifteen hundred in Baikul.”
“Drop each of those numbers by two hundred fifty,” he told her. “Damn. We don’t have enough people to shut them down by force, unless we’re willing to strike from up here, which would pretty much kill any shot at diplomacy. How far off is Meridia?”
“Eighteen hours.”
“Captain Foster,” Herrod interrupted, “let me jump on this. If they’re mostly still in the threat stage, we may be able to string together some kind of a cease-fire if we agree to help them retrieve the cargo.”
It was not, Jessica thought, an awful idea. Before he’d come aboard Galileo, she’d never have considered Herrod a diplomat, although she recognized that was mostly because he’d never had to be tactful with her. Recently, though, she had decided the role suited him: he read people extremely well, and he seemed to know instinctively when to behave with sympathy, whatever he might really be thinking.
Greg, it seemed, thought the same; he nodded. “Very well. I’ll be in the infirmary with Goldjani. Let me know what you hear from them. And, Admiral—thank you for your help down there.”
That had cost Greg something, but Herrod just arched an eyebrow at him. “I could hardly sit back and do nothing, now could I?” He nodded at Jessica. “Commander Lockwood.” And he left the landing bay.
Jessica gave Greg an inquiring look, and he shrugged. “He held off the attackers,” he told her. “From inside Sparrow, but still. Freed us up to do what needed doing. He was a genuine help.”
Despite her approval of Herrod’s diplomatic abilities, she still knew too much about him to trust his motives. She couldn’t keep the acid out of her voice when she responded. “Could you maybe go on a flight once in your life without getting shot at?”
“They weren’t shooting at us, really,” he told her. “It’s pretty much devolved down there. Budapest was set up from the start.”
Not my point, she thought, but she knew him well enough to let it go. “How’s the kid?”
“Bad.”
Minutes later the med team emerged with a boy on an anti-grav stretcher. His brown skin had alarming undertones of gray, but his eyes, as they swept over the storage bay, were alert and shiny. He met Jessica’s eyes and blinked, then turned away self-consciously. Lucid, then, she thought. It wasn’t a guarantee of anything, but it was not a terrible sign.
After him, dressed in a civilian env suit and covered in dust and something that smelled far worse, came Elena.
Her expression was drawn and anxious, and her appearance was uncharacteristically unkempt. Strands of hair had escaped from a loose braid and were hanging over her face, covered in the same red dust; but through the grime Jessica could see streaks of bright blue interwoven with her natural dark locks. A genetic graft, too; the color went down to the roots, and would grow like that until she changed it. It was a pretty color, Jessica thought, but the fact of it bothered her. Artificial hair color was a nod to civilian conformity. For Elena, it seemed like defeat.
“Is it that bad?”
Jessica realized she had been staring. She met her friend’s eyes, and suddenly none of it mattered, and she flung her arms around Elena, standing on her toes so she could give her tall friend a proper hug. Elena hugged her back. “You look just the same, Jessie,” she said.
Jessica pulled away, aware she was now covered in the same muck Elena was. “You stink,” she said. “And no, the color’s not bad at all. Why blue?”
“It cheers me up,” Elena said. Her smile was wan, and Jessica realized she was worried.
“You want to follow your friend to the infirmary?”
“And get away from the landing bay. Bear will be here any minute, and I can’t take him yelling at me just yet.”
“It’s not your fault the kid decided to follow you.”
She felt Greg move to stand next to her, and Elena’s eyes shifted to meet the captain’s. “I think that’s a matter of opinion,” she said, and she sounded tired.
“He’s awake and alert,” Greg told her quietly. “That’s a good sign.”
Which meant, Jessica realized, that Greg was worried about the boy as well.
The three of them headed for the infirmary. Jessica walked between them, half an eye on Elena. This was the first time her friend had been on board Galileo in eighteen months. Jessica had imagined the reunion a dozen times, and it had never been like this: Elena filthy and dispirited, barely noticing the clean, bright halls of her former home. She wouldn’t be staying, either, Jessica realized; this would only be a visit.
Maybe being home doesn’t mean that much to her after all. Given how long Elena had been away, the idea stung more than Jessica thought it would.
Bob Hastings, Galileo’s chief of medicine, was waiting for them and had the med scanner out as the medics shifted the boy to one of the infirmary beds. The doctor frowned at the readout, then waved them away. “Ten minutes,” he told them. His blue eyes swept over Elena. “You. Stay close by. You don’t look so good, either.”
Elena looked as if she wanted to protest, but she hung back, her miserable eyes on Arin. The boy wouldn’t look at her.
“Come on,” Greg said, his voice gentle. “Bob will take care of him.”
Jessica tried to catch Bob’s eye as they left, but his expression was grim and focused. Jessica looked down at Arin and made herself smile reassuringly. “Lousy bedside manner,” she told him, “but he’ll look after you.”
Damned if the kid didn’t smile back.
Once they were outside, Jessica couldn’t wait any longer. “What happened?”
“He stowed away and hid,” Elena said simply. “And when we crashed, nothing in the shuttle was secured. All the cargo landed on him.”
“After they shot at you,” Jessica pointed out. “Elena—”
“Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.”
“Of course it’s not!” Jessica’s temper flared. “How the hell could it be? Nineteen years old is grown-up on every damn colony we’ve got. And he knew how to secure himself on that ship, stowaway or not. Bob will fix him,” she said, “and then you can yell at him for being a stupid ass.”
“Where’s my boy?”
Jessica started; they should have been warned when Bear Savosky arrived, but she supposed he was too well-known to the crew for anyone to think of him as a guest. Normally Bear was relaxed and smiling, his massive bulk comfortable rather than a threat. But now he radiated rage and fear, and all of his ire was directed at Elena.
Who inexplicably didn’t defend herself. “Bob’s looking after him,” Elena said. “He should be out soon.”
