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.
But there was no comm now behind his right ear.
She checked the other side. “Did he take his comm off often?” she ask
ed Dallas.
“A comm means money’s coming in,” Dallas said. “He wouldn’t ever disconnect.”
She looked up then, wondering why she hadn’t asked before. “Do you know—when he was killed, was there anybody in port? Like we are now?”
Dallas shrugged. “I don’t keep track of visitors. Too many.”
“You saw them take him.” A nod. “Did they scrape off his comm?”
“Nope. Grabbed him. Hauled him off. Threw him out.”
“Did he fight?”
“Wouldn’t you?” When she glared, Dallas added, “Screamed bloody murder, hung on to the doorway. Took three of them to get him out.”
The doorway. It made no difference; she doubted he would have had that kind of presence of mind. Still, he had been right about people being after him, had made the effort to locate her to ask for help . . . She walked up to the door and ran her fingers around the frame.
And when she pulled her hand away, a tiny, blood-covered comm strip was stuck under her fingernail.
Comms weren’t guaranteed durable storage, although many people used them that way. Anything important, anything you really wanted to keep, was better passed on to a longer-term system. Most people kept their information on the open network, encrypted with bio codes: vids, games, books, messages from family and friends. Elena, when she had been with the Corps, had saved almost nothing locally; but even so, when she resigned, she destroyed her comm strip rather than turning it in. The one she was wearing now she’d had only for a year, and it held nothing beyond ordinary comms traffic and a few vids from her mother. An older comm, like Jamyung’s, would be packed with intertwined data, but recent messages would be easy to retrieve.
And the best place to find a decent scanner that could examine the comm was in Jamyung’s vault.
Without looking at Dallas, she dropped into the hole in the floor next to Jamyung’s desk. Increasing the output of her light, she straightened, and scanned the big room. It had been, not unexpectedly, entirely tossed; but Jamyung’s diagnostic equipment was more or less where he had left it. His comm scanner was on the floor, still in one piece, and Elena wasted no time adhering the comm chip to the tabletop and flicking on the scanner.
And there it was, right on the top, recorded less than two minutes before the comm was deactivated: a message.
She tried to replay it, using her own comm to amplify, but it was encrypted. Damn. He had to have left the message for her. What would he have used to encrypt it, with little to no warning that the end was coming? A number? How could she guess? An ident code? A bio key? His own bio key would be invalid now that he was dead, and she was fairly certain he wouldn’t ever have had access to hers. Remembering his cleverness, she tried it anyway, but the message didn’t budge.
A code word, then. Something he thought she would try.
“Jamyung,” she said. And then: “Dallas.” Maybe he’d sent the scavenger to meet her for a reason.
Nothing.
Budapest. Earth. Yakutsk. Smolensk. Rat-fucking murdering bastards. None of them worked. She was running out of time.
And then it came to her, certain and obvious.
“Galileo,” she said, and the message began to play.
“They’re here,” Jamyung whispered. Wherever he was, he was in hiding; she heard bangs and crashes around him. “They won’t find it. Don’t let them get it. It’s in the back, in the compost. Well, it was compost. The cats get at it now. Take it out of here, and don’t let them know. I don’t know what the fuck it is, Shaw, but you need to keep it away from these bastards. It won’t help them, not on purpose. But maybe it won’t have a choice. Don’t give them the chance, Shaw. Don’t—”
Jamyung took a gasping breath, and the message ended.
Elena sat back on her heels, thinking, pushing aside a wave of sorrow at the trader’s death. She still found his description unconvincing, and his anthropomorphizing of this unknown object didn’t change her mind. But he’d died for something, and whether or not the thing was really talking to him, someone had thought it was important.
She wanted to know why.
She checked her comm; she had twelve minutes before Bear would expect her back. She stood, and turned to Dallas. “Where’s the compost heap?”
Chapter 4
Galileo
Greg rarely used the off-grid anymore. Earlier in his career, it had been a last-ditch method of communication with parties he was not officially supposed to be contacting: PSI ships, off-schedule freighters, even—occasionally—Syndicate raiders, although in those instances he was almost always delivering some sort of threat disguised as compromise. As a general rule, if he could provide the Admiralty with a positive result, they didn’t much care if all his negotiations were on the record with Galileo’s comms system or not. The off-grid allowed him to use tactics of which the Corps would not have officially approved.
The Admiralty would know, if they cared to check Galileo’s logs, when he had spoken with Captain Taras, and what she had asked him to do. They would not know when—or if—he had managed to contact Chryse unless he chose to tell them.
Greg went through the door connecting his office with his quarters and let it sweep closed behind him. Some of his pent-up tension evaporated in the silence. He was aware it was an odd room, given how long he had lived in it: unadorned with vid, picture, or artwork of any kind, nothing personal except a few physical books his mother had left him when she died. For years, the Corps-issue dresser had held a still picture of his wife, and he had kept it long after he had realized he had no love for her anymore, long after he had resigned himself to hanging on to a marriage that meant nothing to him. Getting rid of it after their divorce had felt freeing, but also disorienting. Some days he walked in still expecting to see her looking back at him, pale and beautiful and not at all what he wanted.
The books, which were a more fond reminder of the tendrils of the life he still had outside the Corps, held half the off-grid, with the other half tucked under his mattress. He kept it in two pieces, just in case. As far as he knew, the only other people who knew its location were Jessica Lockwood, his second-in-command, and Ted Shimada, Galileo’s chief of engineering. He trusted both of them to keep it to themselves.
He retrieved the two clear polymer sheets and slid them together, laying the unit on the top of his dresser. It pulsed once, an almost subvisual wave of deep purple, and he keyed in Chryse’s ident. Greg’s off-grid would show up as Galileo on the other end, unless Chryse had more detailed data from the last PSI ship that had received communications from this unit. That ship—Orunmila—was in the Third Sector, and it occurred to him that, among all of the questions he might have asked Taras, he should have asked how much of PSI’s intelligence about the Corps they shared with each other. It might have saved him a considerable amount of time.
Long ago, when he was young and innocent, he had been irritable that PSI seemed so suspicious of Central. At this point in his career, he knew better.
An off-grid comm often languished for a long time, sometimes hours, before it was acknowledged, but Greg’s signal was picked up almost immediately. “Galileo, this is Captain Bayandi of the starship Chryse. To whom am I speaking?”
And didn’t that set Greg back on his heels.
Captain Bayandi.
Captain Bayandi.
Nobody spoke with Captain Bayandi. It occurred to Greg there was probably no way even to verify the man’s identity. Every meager interaction Central had ever had with Chryse had been through subordinates. The voice was baritone, cautious, but with overtones of genuine warmth. Welcoming, Greg thought, which fit nothing he knew of Chryse at all.
Regrouping, he introduced himself. “This is Captain Greg Foster of the CCSS Galileo. I hope I’m not disturbing you, Captain.”
“Not at all, Captain Foster.” No hesitation. “What can I do for you?”
Tell me who you are, Greg thought. Tell me what your ship is. Tell me about your crew. Tell me why you ne
ver talk to us. Tell me why you never talk to your own people. “I’m contacting you at the request of Captain Taras,” he said.
“Is she all right? Is Meridia in danger?”
Instant concern, and convincing worry. In so many ways, this was not the conversation Greg had thought he would be having. “Meridia is in fine shape, Captain,” Greg assured him. “And I spoke with Captain Taras a little while ago. She is in good health and spirits. But she’s concerned about your ship, and asked if I could speak with you.”
“I don’t understand. We spoke with Captain Taras yesterday. Commander Ilyana should be arriving at Meridia in just a few hours.”
Greg would have expected annoyance; Bayandi only sounded confused.
“I don’t want to speak for her,” Greg said carefully. “But I have the impression that she’s still worried about your comms outage a few months ago, and the reason for Commander Ilyana’s trip.”
Bayandi was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said at last, and he sounded resigned. “I should have given Captain Taras more detail. I apologize for the need for your involvement, Captain Foster.”
Taras was right; it felt very much like a family squabble. “Don’t be concerned about that, Captain,” he said. “May I ask—is there something we can help you with? Yakutsk notwithstanding, I have some maintenance people I can spare if they would be useful.”
“That is very kind of you, Captain,” Bayandi said, impeccably sincere. “There is nothing for you to help us with. Ilyana should be able to answer Taras’s questions when she arrives, and we’ll join you at Yakutsk twelve hours afterward. Do you know, yet, if there is anything specific you will need?”
“No, Captain, but thank you.” Greg frowned. Pleasantries, Taras had said, and it had annoyed her. He was understanding how she felt, but he had no standing to demand answers or details. A PSI ship the Corps had rarely contacted was unlikely to willingly disclose damage information. And if Bayandi had personal reasons for shutting out Captain Taras—that was not a relationship Greg could mediate.
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