The kid smiled. “No, sir.”
“As long as you’re a civilian,” Greg corrected him, “I’m not ‘sir.’ You can call me Captain, or just Greg, if you like.”
“I’d like to see Galileo, Captain,” Goldjani said.
“Excellent. Then let’s get you out of here.” He turned to Elena. “We need some kind of a stretcher.”
“Come on, Elena,” Goldjani put in. “I can walk.”
She ignored him. “We’ll need to pull one of these containers apart,” she said. “We dumped all the usual supplies off this bird to make room for the seed.”
They poured the contents of one container into the sand outside the door. Greg took a quick look; the colonists were still milling around in front of Sparrow, murmuring to themselves, their hands still on their weapons, eyeing Greg’s infantry with increasing boldness. We are running out of time, he thought. Behind him, Elena had brought out a power saw and was running it rapidly through the corrugated material of the container. “I’ll need to reinforce it,” she told him, eyes on her work. “It’s too flexible.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” Goldjani asked plaintively.
Elena’s jaw set. “You can stay home next time,” she snapped, and the boy fell silent. Greg glanced at him; his expression had closed. Goldjani didn’t know her well enough to recognize fear.
Just then, Greg heard a hail of footsteps on the ship’s hull, and the whole structure shook. He turned to look out the door and saw people jumping to the ground, shooting toward the other set of colonists. His platoon was shouting, but the colonists were leaving them alone. Damn, now they really were in the middle of a firefight. “Move it, Elena,” he said.
She finished fastening three horizontal panels on the bottom of the sheeting. “Watch your fingers,” she warned Greg, lowering the makeshift stretcher to the ground next to Goldjani. “The edges are a little rough.”
Goldjani, subdued, didn’t resist when Greg and Elena slid him gently onto the stretcher. If they hurt him further, he didn’t let on. Stubborn kid. Greg remembered himself at nineteen, powered by nothing but hormones and self-righteous anger. He would have been equally stupid in Goldjani’s situation. “I have to warn you,” he said, hoping to cheer the kid up, “my doctor’s kind of a dick.”
“Then why do you keep him?” At least Goldjani was making an effort.
“Because he mixes really good drinks and lets me win at cards,” Greg told him. Goldjani smiled, and Greg thought it was partly genuine.
“Anything here you need to bring?” he asked Elena.
“No. Wait!” She dashed to the front of the shuttle and retrieved something off the floor: a box, about fifteen centimeters across. From the way she lifted it, it was either empty or contained something quite light. She tucked it into her pocket. “Bear’s going to have my damn head,” she said, giving a resigned glance around the shuttle. Then she looked back at him, businesslike, determined, familiar. “Let’s get out of here before somebody drops a nuke on those guys.”
She took Goldjani’s head, and Greg lifted the corrugated sheet at his feet. He commed Bristol and Darrow. “We’re coming out with wounded,” he said. “Cover us.”
They lifted, and he backed out of the shuttle, steadying himself in the dirt before Elena came out after him. The colonists were all in front of Sparrow now, ignoring Herrod’s repeated exhortations for a cease-fire, shooting determinedly at each other. Along with the shooting, there were a couple of fistfights. In the training vids, enemies were always expert and organized, with a strategy discernible after a few minutes of observation. In reality, colony squabbles were almost always made up of a bunch of homeowners engaged in a deadly slap-fight with their neighbors.
Before they could make it to the door, a plasma flare sped past Greg’s head, and he swore. “One more shot like that,” he shouted, “and we’ll blow it up, do you hear me? We’ve got wounded here! Stand the fuck down!”
Another shot went wide, and they started scrambling for the door. “When we get inside,” Greg told Darrow, “fire one shot directly back at Budapest’s shuttle, and withdraw.”
Goldjani protested. “You really want them to blow up the cargo?”
“Plasma cannon won’t breach the cargo containers,” Elena told him. “But it’ll destroy the shuttle and make a hell of a statement. They’ll leave us alone long enough for us to get out of here.”
Another shot caught the side of Sparrow, and Greg cursed. “Now, Darrow!” he shouted, hauling his end of the stretcher into the ship.
Darrow aimed the cannon and fired, and Greg realized they should have been farther away.
The shuttle blew instantly, the chemical flame lighting up the landscape. The shipping containers, as advertised, were jostled by the blast but undamaged. But the seed they had dumped into the dirt was vaporized, a cloud of dust sinking slowly in the low gravity. Greg knew the colonists could see it, too.
The platoon hustled inside, the door closing behind them. Greg and Elena set Goldjani’s stretcher down, and he left her to seal the door while he went to the pilot’s seat to get them out of there. Herrod was already standing, giving up his place.
The grain distraction had worked, at least in part. Some of the colonists had rushed over to the cargo containers, tugging at them, desperately trying to pull them aside. Desperately. There was a lot of seed, but their actions suggested they needed every bit of it, including what had been destroyed. “Is there more?” Greg asked Elena.
“On Nova Ganymede,” she said. “Six weeks away.”
Of course. “Get him secure,” Greg told his soldiers grimly. “We’re getting out of here.”
More colonists had surrounded the containers, ignoring Sparrow’s weapons. They were squabbling again, shoving at each other. Someone behind the row of colonists began to fire, and the people began to drop, one by one in a row, from both sides. “But—” Arin broke off. “Can’t you stop them?”
“We’ve got nothing to stop them with,” Greg said, as gently as he could. And he lifted them off, abandoning the chaos, pointing Sparrow’s nose at the pristine stars.
Chapter 7
Greg lifted them off slowly, most likely in deference to the people on the ground, but Elena didn’t think his consideration would be necessary much longer. She had seen far too many squabbles go this way. In a few minutes, Yakutsk would be down five-hundred-odd colonists, and the dome governments would be back to accusations and raids. Or worse.
And she wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to help.
She sat on the floor next to Arin, gripping the bench as the shuttle rose through Yakutsk’s light gravity and began generating its own field, stabilizing them. Shit. She was going to have to comm Bear.
“Greg,” she said, “can I have comms control?”
Across from her, Admiral Herrod sat in silence. She wanted to tell him to say something; his silence was unnerving. But he had helped, she realized. He had kept the shooters off them long enough for them to get Arin to safety. He had done something good.
Even a stopped clock is right once a day.
“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. W
e’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
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 arse
nal. 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.”
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