The hallway opened into a large room, fully as wide as the shuttle itself, and furnished like crew’s quarters. There was a bank of drawers along the opposite wall, and a bunk under a long, narrow window, reminding her of her quarters on Budapest. Next to her was a large sofa, luxurious and overstuffed, and before the sofa was the source of the voice: a recorded comm, playing in the center of the room. There was a young woman talking, relaxed, dressed all in black as PSI generally were, speaking in a modified version of the familiar Fourth Sector dialect.
“. . . know how she is, Mama. Loves school, hates me.” The woman laughed, and the expression lit her sober, dark eyes. “I’m happy, really. I don’t want her upset when I leave her. They keep telling me I should be jealous that a little girl likes her teachers more than her mama, but I love it. She’s learning.” The woman sighed. “Well, I know you’ve got a long trip. I’ll see you when you get back, yes? Love you, Mama.”
There was a slight digital fillip, and as the message restarted Elena turned to find, lying on the couch, facing the vid with her eyes closed, a woman.
She was short and broad-shouldered, compactly built, with a thick waist and narrow hips. Her skin was dark, and her black hair, cropped short, curled loosely against her skull. She had thin lips and a broad nose, and her eyelids were large and deep-set under thick, oddly graceful eyebrows. Her skin boasted few lines, but something in the softness of her jaw and the faint folds at the edges of her eyes suggested to Elena she was well past fifty.
“Hello?”
The woman didn’t move.
Slinging the rifle back over her shoulder, Elena pulled off one of her gloves and moved to the woman’s side. She felt for the pulse in her neck: strong and steady. But she couldn’t be sleeping, not with Elena poking at her. Elena stood and scanned the small room for a med kit, spying it tucked underneath the bunk. Unlike the kit on Budapest’s shuttle, this was a Level Five kit, and she raised her eyebrows. With a little training, one could do bone grafts and neurological treatments with a Level Five. This was luxury, or the expectation that Cytheria would be traveling alone for long distances indeed.
One quick pass with the kit’s scanner told her what she had suspected: the woman was drugged. The tranquilizer was a common one, and not generally so soporific; but her system was flooded with it. Elena frowned. Ordinarily, injectors would detect dangerous levels of drugs and fail to deploy. Either something had been faulty in the dosing mechanism, or the woman had overridden the safeties on purpose.
The scanner also told her the woman was malnourished, and probably had not been taking in sufficient calories for at least two weeks. Which might explain the drugs, Elena supposed; if she could sleep more, she wouldn’t need as much food to survive. She would have to check the shuttle’s records and food supply. Perhaps the early drop-out meant Cytheria’s journey was going to take longer than the supplies the woman had brought.
The vid looped again, and absently Elena turned to swipe it off.
And in that instant, a hand clamped around her wrist.
Chapter 13
Galileo
“Can you tell if the comm was routed through this thing?” Greg asked Jessica.
They stood in one of the machine room’s small utility areas, where Shimada had sensibly chosen to test the object. “I’d have to look at Cytheria’s records,” she replied.
Greg checked the time. Elena would be arriving at Cytheria’s last reported location soon, but he had no idea if she’d be able to bring the injured PSI ship back with her. “For now, I think we need to assume the artifact had something to do with the message going to only Elena and me. Was there any increase in radiation when you started scraping it?”
Ted Shimada shook his head. “All other readings stayed constant. But opening it up, knowing nothing about what’s inside of it . . . Its behavior so far has been largely benign, sir, but I think we’d want a very controlled environment before we did that. Like an off-site drone.”
He looked up to meet Ted’s eyes. “Automated?”
“There could be anything in there, sir,” he pointed out.
Greg had a brief, unfair thought—Elena would not have been so overcautious—and looked back down at the artifact. Ordinary gray polymer, now with a smooth etched curve on one side where Ted had gently bored into it. Greg had to admit there was something about it, some aesthetic appeal that made the idea of it being dangerous somehow absurd. “Let me ask you two something,” he said. “When you look at it, what do you see?”
He met Jessica’s eyes. She had that look that suggested he had just asked her something so far outside her realm of experience that she was wondering if he was serious. “Do you mean—what, its physical characteristics?”
He shrugged, not wanting to lead her.
Jessica looked down at it gamely. “It’s square on one side, oblong on the other two. Rounded corners and edges. Kind of . . . gray and nondescript.” She looked back up at him. “That’s not what you were going for, is it?”
“Does it hold any artistic appeal for you?” He glanced at Ted. “Either of you?”
Jessica and Ted exchanged a careful glance. “You mean,” Jessica said, “would anyone pay for it?” Jessica had an extensive art collection, some of which Greg liked very much. “I wouldn’t,” she said decisively. “To me, it reads industrial and uninteresting.”
Ted nodded in agreement. “Can’t say I’d see it as anything other than ordinary camouflage, sir.”
Which opened up a whole host of possibilities. Coincidence, he thought. Surely it wouldn’t just be me and Elena. “You got nothing when you touched it,” he confirmed.
Ted shook his head. “It may have scraped Lanie’s comm, but it didn’t want anything to do with mine.”
But Jessica had figured him out. “No,” she said adamantly. “Absolutely not. I’ll do it, Greg, if you’re dead set on somebody else trying it. But not you.”
“You can’t do it,” he told her. “You’ve got to be ready to deploy the infantry.”
“Fuck you, Greg, you’ve got to be ready to deploy the infantry!” Next to her Ted shifted uncomfortably. “You can’t take the risk of touching this thing!”
“Jess.” He looked down at her, willing her to understand. “If that thing is Ellis tech—if it’s a weapon—we need to understand it, and fast. We’ve had the control test, and Elena’s not here. It has to be me. I’m the only other person it’s contacted, and we don’t have time to wait for the best of all possible worlds.”
She closed her mouth and scowled, and he knew he had her. “Just once,” she said, unable to keep quiet, “I’d like a world where the best choice isn’t one where you need to do something completely fucking insane.”
“Leviathan,” Greg ordered, “decouple yourself from Galileo.” A moment later there was a brief flash of acknowledgment, and the shuttle was as isolated as if it were in an unexplored sector of the galaxy.
He had taken Leviathan, a cramped two-person shuttle, a hundred kilometers outside of his ship. It was not quite as dramatic a solution as Ted’s unmonitored drone, but it had seemed a safer alternative to the isolated utility room. Caution still felt unnatural, but he felt mildly relieved his objectivity seemed to be intact. Liking something, he had learned long, long ago, didn’t mean it wasn’t going to hurt you.
He took a moment to turn the ship so the nose was facing away from Galileo, away from Yakutsk, toward the vast empty space past this star system. Nothing but blackness and small, flaring lights, systems too distant to be anything but dust. Silent and beautiful. I should do this more often, he thought. It soothed his nerves, cleared his head, gave him a sense of stillness and contentment. He thought he could have watched for quite some time, absorbing the peace and quiet.
But Jessica was already jumpy. If he didn’t get moving, she would assume something was wrong and start comming him, destroying the isolated field they had so carefully set up. He got up from the pilot’s seat and went to the back of the cabin, whe
re Jessica and Ted had set up the scanning equipment, and stared down at the box on the table.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s do this.”
He opened the box and once again looked at the object inside. Jessica was right, in one sense. It was nothing but a cuboid: gray, flat, and pointless. But it still drew his eye, gave him a feeling of balance, made him want to run his finger over it. He wondered if his artistic sensibilities were so different from Jessica’s. Certainly some of the cluttered nonsense she collected was beyond him, but a lot of it he enjoyed in the same way he enjoyed this artifact. The pieces she had that he liked were shaped not like real objects, but like feelings, abstract representations of beauty and humor and happiness and sadness. This artifact was all about longing, this squat six-sided object, rounded and symmetrical, but only on two axes. Almost but not quite perfectly balanced. Almost what it wanted to be.
He took a breath, and reached out his finger and touched it.
One second. Two. Three . . .
It began as a low rumble of conversation, like a cafeteria crowd, cacophonous but not distressed. That made sense; most of his comms traffic was chatter, either brief comms to one of his crew, or a debriefing of some sort with an admiral. Aggregated, it sounded mundane, almost soothing; hypnotic in its utter sameness.
Voices began to distinguish themselves in the tumult. His own, of course; perhaps he spent more time talking than listening. He thought he heard Jessica’s lilt in there, and now and then Elena’s, but he could make out no words. He closed his eyes, letting the sound wash over him, everyone he knew, his whole history.
The first words he made out were his father’s. It was the conversation they’d had, all those years ago, when he commed Greg to tell him he was getting married again.
. . . acting disrespectful, to be honest, Greg.
Not as disrespectful as you replacing a dead woman.
Anger. Acrimony. He felt a wave of shame wash over him. He heard his father again, the same sign-off he gave every time they spoke: I love you, Greg. Until recently, always followed by Greg’s silence.
I’m sorry, he thought; but it was the past, and it was just a sound, playing over his comm, and surely it would end soon.
There was a rhythm beginning underneath it all, at first so low he wasn’t sure what it was, but it repeated and repeated and grew louder and he recognized his heartbeat, accelerated as it was when he was running, steady and true, over and over again. Louder and louder.
And then it stopped. Everything stopped. And in the silence, his comm played the last words he’d ever heard his mother speak, from a recording off of a long-dead starship:
. . . dying here while you assholes run off?
He was a child again, running along the shore while his mother went swimming, while she laughed and called out to him and tried to lure him in. He waited on the shore for her, giggling and shaking his head, watching her dive and come up again, dive and come up, dive and . . . she didn’t come up this time. Mom? he shouted at the sea. Mama?
This isn’t how it happened, a part of him recognized. This isn’t how she died. But all he could feel was panic.
He ran into the ocean, but it beat him back, washing over him, shoving him aside. He fought it, scrambling, diving into the surf, eyes open under the water, scanning for her. Surely he would find her. Surely she would be fine. She was his mother. Nothing ever happened to her. She was always there.
He had to breathe, and his head came up out of the water, and he shouted for her again: Mama! Mama! Mama! Where are you?
And then he was a grown man, and he was standing on the shore, and he was watching the child struggle in the surf, calling for his mother, over and over, and he couldn’t move and he couldn’t help, and he watched the boy go under, over and over again, and his feet were rooted and all he could do was cry out:
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?
And then there was only darkness.
Chapter 14
Cytheria
“Leave it.”
Elena started, and turned away from the vid. The woman was wide awake, eyes open, black and hostile depths fixed on Elena’s face. Her expression was haunted, and Elena couldn’t tell if she was agitated with fear or anger. Possibly both, she supposed. The woman’s grip on Elena’s wrist was certainly solid.
The woman had spoken in dialect. As gently as she could, Elena responded in kind. “I’m sorry,” she said, not pulling against the woman’s hand. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Her dialect was rustier than she wanted to admit, but the woman clearly understood. She blinked once, then twice; and suddenly her hostility dissolved, and her expression settled into mildly pleasant blandness. She removed her hand from Elena’s wrist and tucked it back next to her side. “That is all right,” she said. She spoke Standard this time, undoubtedly clued in by Elena’s atrocious accent. “I didn’t expect anyone to find me.” With what looked like reluctance, she reached out and paused the vid. “Do you know what day it is?”
Elena gave her the date. “How long have you been out here?”
Another blink, then a frown. “Thirty-seven days. I was headed for Meridia. Is that why we have dropped out? Are we there?”
“You’re close,” Elena said. “In the field, they’re about sixteen hours off. What is your name?”
The woman’s eyes were straying slowly over the room, always returning first to the vid, and then to Elena’s face. “I am Commander Tatiana Ilyana of the PSI ship Chryse,” she said. “I am supposed to deliver a message to the Central Corps starship Galileo.”
A message? She wondered why Bayandi hadn’t mentioned that to Greg. “You’re in luck,” she said, hiding her reaction, “because that’s where I need to take you. Cytheria is reparable, but I don’t think we should take the time now. You need medical treatment.”
Elena wasn’t sure Ilyana had heard the last part of what she had said. The woman’s eyes had narrowed, focusing on Elena’s face, suddenly not seeming at all like someone who had been drugged for days. “I know you,” she said.
Elena was certain she had never met anyone from Chryse in her life, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she had been recognized by PSI. “I’m sure we haven’t met,” she tried, but the woman was shaking her head.
“No, I have seen you. On vid. You are Elena Shaw.”
“Yes.” She had learned not to say anything more than that.
But the woman was giving her a tired smile. “This is serendipitous. My message is to be delivered to both you and Captain Foster.”
Any thought that the distress call had been a coincidence vanished. “Commander Ilyana, did you instruct Cytheria to contact us? Captain Foster and myself?”
Ilyana blinked again. “I didn’t instruct Cytheria to contact anyone.”
The woman lay still as Elena dosed her with vitamins and found a nutritional drink in Cytheria’s tiny galley. While she was there, she opened the storage bins: food. Horrible, prefab stuff, likely tasteless; but there was plenty of it. For one person, it would last months, possibly years. When she returned to the living room with the drink, she found Ilyana sitting up, regarding the stilled vid with that oddly puzzled look. Elena began to wonder if that was just how she looked when she was thinking.
“Here,” she said, and sat down next to the woman. “Commander, among other things, you’re malnourished. Is there a reason you haven’t been eating?”
For a moment, Ilyana’s expression did not change; then she seemed to realize Elena had spoken, and turned away from the vid. “I don’t think so,” she said, and sounded apologetic. “I expect I forgot. I don’t tend to look at the chronometer, and things in here . . . I lose track of time.”
Her eyes went back to the vid, and this time Elena asked. “Is that your daughter?”
Blink. “Yes.”
“She looks like you.”
“Yes. She’s back on Chryse. She doesn’t like it when I travel.”
Elena waited until Ilyana had finished all of the drink, then stood. “Do you think you can walk?” she asked.
Ilyana braced her hands against the sofa and pushed. Remembering the woman’s original skittishness, Elena offered a careful hand, and Ilyana grasped her wrist, pulling. She got to her feet, looking dizzy, hanging on tight. She was indeed short, barely reaching Elena’s shoulder, and after a moment she lifted her other hand to grasp Elena’s upper arm. “Just one moment,” she said faintly. Her eyes dropped closed again, and Elena saw her take a deep breath and let it out. She straightened and dropped one hand, the other still gripping Elena’s wrist. When she opened her eyes, she looked steadier.
“If we move slowly,” she said, “I believe I will be all right.”
“Is there anything you want to bring?” Elena asked her.
“No.” But when Elena turned to lead her out, the woman squeezed her wrist again. “Wait.”
She detached herself from Elena and, with more grace than Elena would have expected, stepped over to the frozen vid. She touched the comm behind her ear and whispered, and Elena saw the vid disappear. Taking it with her, Elena realized. Just in case.
Elena climbed back onto Nightingale first, then reached down to take Ilyana’s arms. Even malnourished, the woman was sturdily built, and Elena had to brace her feet on the door to lift her with any dexterity at all. Once inside, the woman rolled into a sitting position, her eyes taking in the small space. Her eyebrows twitched together briefly, then she took Elena’s offered hand and climbed to her feet.
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