“It’s not tense, Nai. If they’re really talking about nuking each other—”
"Do you think those rumors are true?” The question was a serious one.
Elena opened her mouth to equivocate, then sighed and nodded. “I know what Bear said, and I know it doesn’t add up. But if it’s not nukes, it’s something. Jamyung—he’s an odd one, but he doesn’t panic for no reason. Something has genuinely spooked him. We need to be careful. We need to be afraid, or we’ll die.”
And as Elena looked into her friend’s dark eyes, she realized Nai was afraid. Nai believed her, even if Bear didn’t. Nai understood the risks, and she knew they might all die in the pursuit of this delivery.
And none of that deterred her at all.
“I’m glad you’re doing the flying then,” Nai told her. She squeezed Elena’s arm briefly before she let go. “And I’m glad Bear is leaving Arin up here.”
“I don’t know that he’ll be any safer,” Elena told her, and Nai’s comforting smile turned sad.
“Nowhere is safe, Elena. Or didn’t you know?”
Chapter 2
Galileo
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” Lieutenant Samaras said. “I have Meridia for you. Captain Taras.”
Captain Greg Foster of the CCSS Galileo dropped to a brisk walk, following the curve of the ship’s gymnasium track around the corner. “She say why she was comming?”
“No, sir. But . . . she was very cheerful, sir.”
Shit. Taras was an acutely intelligent, observant woman, with an oversized personality she knew exactly how to wield. If she had been expansive with Samaras, that meant she was discouraging him from asking questions. Which almost certainly meant something was up. “Thanks for the warning, Lieutenant,” he said. “Put her through.”
Greg stopped by the door to the locker room, where he had left a towel and a flask of water. Two of his officers passed him running the other way, nodding a greeting; Greg, in self-defense, had long since suspended rules around saluting in both the gym and the ship’s pub. He nodded in return, and rubbed the towel over his face. He was sweatier than he had thought.
Taras’s voice was in his ear. “Captain Foster. Have I commed at an inopportune time?”
Not cheerful with him—but more interestingly, not, as Taras usually was, painfully loud. Something was wrong. “Not at all, Captain Taras. Is there something we can help with?”
Another pause. “I don’t know, to be honest, Captain. I am . . . uneasy, and I am hoping that you can provide an alternate perspective.”
All the tension he had just run off returned. “Is this about Yakutsk?”
“Nothing so immediate, Captain. I have heard nothing from Yakutsk since our earlier meeting concluded.”
From the first news of Yakutsk’s terraformer failure, Central Gov had coordinated support and diplomatic efforts with PSI, the informal confederation of generation ships to which Meridia belonged. Both Greg and Gov’s assigned diplomat had been in touch with Captain Taras daily, discussing issues and strategies, remaining in contact with the Yakutsk dome governments to reassure them that help was coming. Not that the reassurance had made a difference; Yakutsk, stuck with limited food stores and an abruptly space-limited population, was falling prey to old political squabbles and civic unrest. The previous week, the entire Baikul government—six administrators and the governor—had “mysteriously” ended up outside the dome without environmental suits, and a new government had been installed in their place. Worse, rumors had been surfacing for days about a developing black market for pocket nuclear devices—the endgame of more colonies than Greg liked to remember.
Before he had embarked on his run, Greg had spent some time persuading the governments of both Baikul and Smolensk to refrain from any violent coups for a while. He was not confident he had succeeded.
Meridia was a day behind Galileo, and Greg had found himself wishing frequently that the PSI ship, with her separate armaments and different rules about interference, was closer. But it seemed, for now, Yakutsk was not Taras’s issue.
“Captain Foster. You are aware of Chryse, are you not?”
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 forg
ed 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
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.
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