“Go ahead.”
She let her eyes wander over the shuttle bay. Leviathan was still sitting there, severed from Galileo’s network, waiting for someone to deal with the artifact that had brought them so much trouble. The small shuttle stood in the wrong corner, away from Herrod’s ship, and she hoped she would have no trouble finding the data chip where he had said it was concealed. She would not have much time, and even Azevedo might get suspicious if he caught her there.
Azevedo had finished verifying her access. “I’ll depressurize for you, Chief,” he said. “Will five minutes do it?”
“Perfect,” she said. “Thanks.”
He turned away from her, facing the bay controls, and she made a show of walking to Herrod’s square-bottomed luxury shuttle. She opened the door, then glanced over her shoulder; Azevedo was still out of sight.
She stepped away from Herrod’s ship and hurried toward Leviathan.
The little shuttle had been locked to everyone apart from herself, Jessica, Ted, and Greg, but such things had never stopped Herrod. She suspected Jessica could have told her how he’d done it, but he’d have left no tracks unless he wanted to. She slid open the door and let her eyes sweep the cabin; it took her a moment to find what she was looking for. Herrod had left the chip at the bottom of the stack of comm blanks, where it blended almost seamlessly; it was unlikely anyone who hadn’t known it was there would have noticed a mismatch. Tugging up her sleeve, she attached the chip to the inside of her wrist, then covered it again.
Step one, she thought, allowing herself a moment of relief, and turned to go.
And then her eyes strayed to the rear of the cabin, where Ted’s vacuum crate sat, undisturbed, holding Jamyung’s artifact.
The thought came, unbidden: It would fit in my pocket.
Absurd to even consider it.
She opened the crate and saw it sitting there, calm and gray and restful. Waiting.
“Don’t talk to me,” she warned. She took a breath, picked it up, and waited.
Silence. New comm, she remembered. It doesn’t like new comms.
She tucked it into her pocket and closed the lid again, then dashed back out. She made it back to Herrod’s ship, and as the door slid closed behind her, she breathed a sigh of relief. She set the artifact on a table in the center of the cabin, then frowned. What was she doing? If Azevedo had caught her, she would have had to make up a story. She had some confidence that she could have convinced him what she was doing was legitimate, but he would certainly have double-checked with Jessica, if not Greg. She had taken a huge risk because—why had she done it? Why the compulsion?
Well, it was done now. And she needed to get moving.
She let her eyes sweep the interior of the shuttle. It was luxurious indeed, but in a way she could respect: everything was efficient, designed perfectly to make optimal use of space and materials. There was a shelf that opened away from the wall to separate the flight cabin from the main area of the ship, effectively providing two private spaces. The shower doubled as a medical closet. Even the flight cabin was comfort and utility: the pilot’s chair was dynamically ergonomic, shifting to mold against her back as she leaned against it. When she powered up, the instruments appeared at just the right luminosity before her eyes, responding instantly to her fingers as she manipulated the ship’s engines.
“It’s locked with Galileo,” Herrod had told her. “If you unlock before you hit the field, they’ll get a notification. You’ve got to get far enough away before you sever the connection.”
Her last connection to home.
She lifted the ship a few inches off the ground and turned to the opening bulkhead. She nudged the ship forward—slowly, a relaxed pilot going for a relaxed flight, just to pass the time, to clear her head—and crossed the barrier between the bright artificial gravity of Galileo’s landing bay and the utter, devouring darkness of space.
The shuttle’s interior lights were set low, and the cabin grew dim as she left Galileo behind. To her left stood Yakutsk, gray and shadowed, the glow of Smolensk in the distance. Beyond it she could see Budapest, squat and stationary, waiting; beyond that, the deep green glow of the gas giant. On her right, there was nothing but empty space, and she turned the shuttle toward the stars.
Of all of them, she thought Bear would be the least surprised. Bear would have expected this of her. If Herrod had approached her anywhere but Galileo, he would have found her surrounded by people expecting her to run off and get herself killed. She would have been trapped by suspicion and jaundiced eyes. Ironic, in a way, that the place she felt safest had been the only place she could have done any of this effectively.
“What are you called?” she asked Herrod’s shuttle.
“Antigone.”
Elena smiled. A good-luck name. Peeling the data comm off of her wrist, she connected it to the ship’s core. She waited for the field to spin up, watching out the front window as the stars dimmed and the polarizer kicked in, filtering the bright white field to a soft sea blue.
“Antigone,” she said, “separate from Galileo.”
“Command code required.”
Elena repeated the code Herrod had given her.
Five more minutes passed, and then the ship dropped out of the field. She waited, verifying that she was transmitting nothing to Galileo, then triggered the second half of Herrod’s flight plan. The coordinates were deep in the middle of nowhere, outside every travel and trade corridor, and they were risking that nobody would have found and scavenged what he had arranged to have left for her there.
The first major risk. If she found nothing, her journey would be over. If she found nothing . . . Ellis would have won.
She watched the field coalesce around Antigone, then stood, leaving the ship to pilot itself. She wandered to the rear cabin, pulling her pilfered artifact out of her pocket. What possessed me? she thought; but as she turned it over in her hands, she felt just a little less bereft. She sat on one of the sofas—absurdly comfortable, and not at all military—and rested her palm on top of the object’s smooth, warm surface.
“Just you and me,” she said to it.
And then she buried her face in her hands, and she wept.
Chapter 32
Galileo
Greg was not surprised when he woke up alone.
He knew Elena well enough to know that she wouldn’t be able to sit long with the intensity of the night before. Whatever had been on her mind, whatever conflagration of emotions had brought her to tears—never mind everything else—she would have tucked it away to be dealt with later. She was most likely in the gym, or back on Budapest, tinkering with something that didn’t need tinkering.
But oh, how he wished she was here with him.
Andriya Vassily was a beautiful woman, and making love with her was always adventurous, always satisfying. She flattered his sexual ego in ways he had long missed. But he was not in love with her, nor she with him. Andriya compartmentalized too much. It was possible Elena did as well; it would explain a lot.
But Greg did not compartmentalize, at least not for long, and as he lay there, slowly waking up, he found himself wanting to go and find Elena, to pull her aside, to find some secluded corridor or closet and make love to her again. He could still feel her hair in his hands, against his lips; could taste her, warmth and musk and sweat, still feel her heat all around him.
He took a shower, long and cold, and thought about the possibility that she would bolt again. It would certainly be in character, and he would have to figure out how to get her to come back into his bed without making her want to disappear entirely. He thought of what he had asked her to say and cursed; he should have let that go. In the moment it had been everything to him, but it had been too much. She had always been clear about her feelings. At this point, though, even his own feelings were irrelevant. The physical memory of her overwhelmed him, and his body made it very clear that his heart could fuck right off. His heart was used to being alone. His body wanted
this woman, and damned if he was going to let stupid vulnerable emotional bullshit stop him. If she was willing to share her body, he would ask for nothing else.
Damn. Why hadn’t she stayed?
Crowds, he decided, were the best idea. He took breakfast in Galileo’s largest cafeteria, where about a hundred people—some just off shift, some almost on—congregated daily. He sat with some of the infantry. They were still subdued, but they stuck with their tradition of telling combat stories at breakfast; today’s were all about victory in the face of adversity, and good outcomes when things looked darkest. It was how they held each other up: Remember the times we survived? Voices of hope, against a void of war and uncertainty.
Admiral Herrod entered the cafeteria halfway through the meal. He earned a few resentful glances, but in general the crew left him alone. He took a plate of food and found a table in the corner, eating without a hint of self-consciousness, reading a book. But he looked tired and a little unkempt, and not for the first time Greg wondered about his health. He usually took breakfast in his room, or in one of the smaller kitchens; Greg wondered if, in the midst of all of this, perhaps even Admiral Herrod felt the need for some company.
After breakfast, Greg returned to his room to assemble the off-grid. He stood for a moment, trying to decide where to sit that would not remind him of the night before, and after a moment he carried the unit into his office. Whatever else the day brought him, he was going to have to figure out how to focus.
Jessica picked up in less than ten minutes. “How is everything there, sir?” she asked.
She had not, of course, intended it to be a loaded question. “We’re holding steady, Jess,” he said. “What have you got for me?”
“Well.” She took a breath. “We’re off in a little bit to the env equipment area. Dallas is going to keep inventorying the system, and I’m going to see if I can get a signal trap into the thing’s telemetry. If it’s not activated, of course, it’s pointless; but we should at least be able to verify—or not—the idea that it’s some kind of maintenance access tool.”
“Dallas didn’t find anything else strange in there?”
“Not yet,” she admitted. “But there’s more to look at. Dallas says it’s way more complicated than it needs to be.”
“New tech,” Greg suggested.
“Dallas says maybe, but really? The thing isn’t using anything new. Nearly all the standard parts are recycled. Salvage. And the new bits are just connectors and such, so far.”
Damn. Ellis had too many tendrils in motion right now. “You find something, Jess,” he told her, “comm me direct. Don’t screw with the off-grid, or going through Bristol. Even if you verify that yes, the thing is just a super-fine brand-new dome env system, tell me. We don’t need this loose end right now.”
“Yes, sir. Sir? There’s one other thing.”
She told him about seeing what appeared to be a recorded scan of Jamyung’s artifact. When she said dellinium, Greg forgot all about the dome systems. “Did you check ambient?” he demanded.
“Hell, yes, faster than I’ve checked anything in my life. There’s nothing, Greg. All radiation levels are normal for a city this size, and even if my comm was malfunctioning and reporting the readings wrong, I’d have been at least losing my hair by now. Nobody’s sick. It was a bogus reading.”
“Did you check the equipment?”
“Didn’t have time, sir. But the unit had been bounced around a little. It’s clearly broken.”
“So why are you telling me about it?”
She paused, and Greg rubbed his eyes. “I just—” She broke off. “It’s probably nothing, Greg. Except that thing. Jamyung should have seen the same no data scan Ted did. For a malfunctioning unit to yell dellinium in a crowded room? That’s a really weird malfunction, don’t you think?”
“I think,” Greg said gently, “you’re getting superstitious about that artifact. You and Shimada figured out what it was doing. It’s a compositor, and that’s it. Dellinium isn’t used, even theoretically, for any kind of comms system, passive or otherwise.”
“Dallas didn’t like it. The artifact, I mean.”
Oh, Lord. “Why is that relevant, Jess?”
“Because that’s another person who reacted to it, unlike me. I look at it, and I see a box. Dallas looked at it and wanted to get as far away from it as humanly possible. Intense aversion. Sort of the opposite of what Lanie’s said about it.”
He wondered if Elena had discussed the object with Dallas. “Hang on. Let me see if I can get her on the line.” He commed Galileo. “Galileo, where’s Elena?”
“Elena Shaw is not on board.”
“Is she on Budapest, then?”
“No. She left in Admiral Herrod’s shuttle at 0423.”
He frowned. Elena had a long-standing habit of flying on her own when she felt the need to think; but Herrod’s shuttle? That was an odd choice. On the other hand, she would have, under ordinary circumstances, taken something like Leviathan, but that ship was tied up. “Can you contact her?”
“No.”
He felt vaguely annoyed, and returned to Jessica. “Elena’s out flying,” he told her.
Jessica, who was no fool, asked, “Why?”
Greg ignored the question. “Listen, Jess. The artifact is contained for now. It’s not going to be receiving comm signals from anybody, not even your weird new env system. Do me a favor, though, and send me everything you have on that upgrade. I want Dallas’s inventory list, your notes, anything you can think of.” He would have to dig up background on Gladkoff himself; he felt certain, Ellis being Ellis, that any official records on the man would currently be in the First Sector dead zone, but he could dig up any reports that had been distributed. “And be careful, Jess. Anything starts looking cagey, you contact Bristol and get out. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. Greg?”
“Yeah, Jess?”
“How about you? Are you okay?”
She had heard it in his voice; she just didn’t know what it was. That makes two of us. “I’m fine, Commander,” he told her. And stop being so fucking perceptive.
He disassembled the off-grid and commed Ted Shimada. “Do we have a portable scanner on Galileo?” Greg asked him.
“Yes, sir.” Ted Shimada, despite his facile good cheer, was a lot like Emily Broadmoor, answering his commander’s questions with easy military efficiency. “What am I scanning?”
“I want you to take another pass over that artifact.”
“Yes, sir.” As much as he was like Emily, Shimada was still too curious to stay completely neutral. “Any reason why now, sir?”
He told Shimada about Jessica’s discovery on Yakutsk, and to his surprise, the engineer laughed. “Sir, I may not be able to find out what’s inside that thing, but it’s not dellinium. Among other things, that polymer surface? That stuff we scanned with no trouble at all. It’s ordinary. It couldn’t contain thorium, never mind dellinium.”
“She says the scanner was broken.”
“That’s a sure thing, sir.” And then Shimada paused. “Dellinium’s a strange thing for a scanner to spit out, isn’t it?”
“And unless Jamyung had previously scanned some dellinium,” Greg concluded, finishing Shimada’s thought, “the artifact wouldn’t have had that information to regurgitate back to the scanner.”
“So either the scanner has a really odd, specific defect,” Shimada said, “or that artifact found a really efficient way to get Jamyung to back the hell off of it.”
Which was easily the most unsettling thought Greg had encountered all day. “Scan it again, Commander,” Greg told him. “And—put on an env suit this time. It’s probably a meaningless precaution, but I don’t care for things that change like that.”
“I’m all for meaningless precautions, sir,” Shimada told him sincerely. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
Greg sat back. It had to be Jamyung’s scanner. There was no way the artifact could have done something like
that. Jessica had analyzed the comm Elena had received; Elena had analyzed Greg’s. Neither of them contained any new information. Both had been scraped from the comm, cacophony out of order, a heuristically generated message of loneliness. Clever, but not innovative.
Except his dream. Greg’s comm signal had not contained the memory of running with his mother on the beach. He had never had a dream of watching himself drown, shouting, helpless. Only a dream, he told himself. But suddenly he wasn’t sure anymore.
He needed to talk to Elena. She was the only other person who had been through it, who might understand. Contacting the comms center, he said, “Samaras, get me a line to Admiral Herrod’s shuttle, will you?”
“Yes, sir.” But when Samaras spoke again, his voice was hesitant. “Sir, I— Antigone is out of contact, sir.”
Greg felt a flash of annoyance. They had all been so focused on emergencies, they had forgotten how to do their jobs. “She’s probably just in the field, Lieutenant. Try her again.”
Another pause. “I’ve tried multiple times, sir. She’s— I don’t know where Antigone is, sir. Galileo isn’t tracking her.”
Uneasiness crept over him. “What do you mean, ‘isn’t tracking’?”
“She’s getting no telemetry from Antigone. In either direction.”
“When did we lose contact?”
Greg waited as Samaras pulled up the records. “0438, sir.”
Fifteen minutes after she departed. “Where did this happen?”
Samaras rattled off a set of coordinates, and Greg mapped them in his head. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers off. The middle of nowhere. Could she—was she deliberately getting lost? “Galileo,” he said, bypassing Samaras entirely, “why was Antigone dropped?”
“Antigone was dropped on the request of former chief of engineering Elena Shaw.”
He was too stunned to know if he was angry or worried. “Did she file a flight plan? Leave a message? Anything?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know where she is.”
“No.”
Every curse he had ever learned floated through his head, but he found himself speechless. “I want a message sent out to every unidentified shuttle in the field that you can scan,” he told the ship. What to say? “Just . . . request an ident from them. A destination. Anything. Find that shuttle.” Damn. She would know how to evade an aboveboard search like that. Why the hell was she running away?
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