Ted’s signal came through loud and clear. “Hey, Commander,” he said easily. “I see your scavenger friend pulled you out of the fire. Also,” he added, before she could snap at him for his frivolity, “Yakutsk is bait.”
At that, Gladkoff, who had been yanked unceremoniously out of his hiding place by Jessica’s infantry and handcuffed with the guards, objected. “Don’t be silly. Yakutsk isn’t bait. It’s just a base of operations.” He looked at Jessica. “I’m here for Chryse. As soon as the ship gets here, we’ll take it and leave.”
She frowned. “What do you mean, take it?”
“It’s his mission,” Dallas told her. “Get them Chryse at any cost.” Dallas’s accent changed, and Jessica recognized skilled mimicry. “Come now, Gladkii. This is not a difficult assignment.”
Gladkoff had to be in some pain. His nose was broken and was bleeding freely down his face, the blood dripping on his fine suit. But he seemed unfazed by both the mimicry and the handcuffs. “They say things like that all the time. But they’re right; this is an easy assignment. All I needed to do was activate the hardware control, and wait.”
“But . . .” Jessica was puzzled. “Chryse’s a PSI ship. They’re not just going to sail off into the sunset with you.”
“The crew’s expendable,” Gladkoff explained.
“Just like Jamyung and Martine,” Dallas said, and Jessica was suddenly conscious that the nose of Dallas’s mangy-looking pulse rifle hadn’t wavered from Gladkoff’s chest.
“Did he kill them, Dallas?”
“Him? I doubt it. But his people”—Dallas swept the rifle’s nose in an arc before aiming it again at Gladkoff’s chest—“yes. Them. That thing that Martine found. Jamyung was right: it’s not a thing these people should have.”
But that, of all things, seemed to cheer Gladkoff up. “Do you know where it is?” he asked eagerly. “I’d pay you for it, legit. That’d be a bonus, bringing that artifact in as well.”
Jessica revised her estimate of his intelligence downward. “I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of these folks willing to trade with you today,” she said.
“You see, Gladkii,” Dallas said evenly, “vacating people is not a good business strategy.” Dallas turned to Jessica. “Can you get in touch with Chryse and tell them what’s going on? They may be able to disconnect from their end.”
Before Jessica could hit her comm, Gladkoff laughed. “You people have no idea, do you?”
“No idea of what?”
But Gladkoff just straightened, his expression utterly unconcerned, as if he stood in handcuffs every day. “Kill the long-range comms. It’s fine. It’s too late anyway.”
Dallas turned to Jessica. “They’ve already shut down the new env systems in Baikul. Their people are on the way here to help us.”
Unity? Now? “Why?”
Dallas gestured with the gun toward Gladkoff’s relaxed figure. “Nobody likes outsiders,” the scavenger explained, and Jessica grinned.
“Let me back in the systems room,” she said. “I’ll get in touch with Galileo. We’ll see if we can give Chryse back her guidance systems.”
“Waste of time,” Gladkoff said.
And Dallas, that rifle never wavering, took a step closer. “I don’t know if this gun works,” Dallas said conversationally. “But I didn’t know about Friederich’s, either.”
“Oh, come now,” Gladkoff said, and Jessica was impressed at how well he almost hid the tremble of fear in his voice. “You’re not going to kill me.”
“Eye for an eye.”
“You already killed one of my guards!”
“That was for Jamyung,” Dallas said. “You killed Martine as well, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t kill anybody.” Gladkoff was beginning to sound pleading.
Dallas only shrugged. “Boss is responsible for his people.”
At that, Gladkoff turned to Jessica. “I have information,” he said. “You can’t let some scavenger kill me.”
“What does the Corps say?” Dallas asked her, eyes never leaving Gladkoff.
“The Corps has no jurisdiction here,” she said, and waited.
“Wait! You’ve got to help me!”
Jessica shrugged.
And after a long moment, Dallas dropped the nose of the rifle. “I guess,” the scavenger said, “I really am a pacifist.”
Jessica, more relieved than she wanted to let on, couldn’t help but smile. “Aren’t we all?” she said, and strode out of the room.
Chapter 47
Galileo
The trip back to Galileo took less than an hour, but to Greg it seemed eternal.
He had mentioned to Bayandi, in passing, Elena’s message, and Chryse’s captain had offered to try to get past the time header. “I can’t unlock it,” he explained, “but it’s possible I can fool it into thinking time is not what it believes it to be.” Greg had spent the entire trip home with his eyes shut, trying to imagine what she could possibly want to say. She would not have done anything as useful as given the explicit coordinates of where she was going; she did not, after all, want him to find her. But there might be clues, or at the very least reasons why she would have done this without telling anyone at all.
Bayandi had been prepared to host Greg on Chryse. The small oxygenated space held both food and entertainment, and even enough room for Greg to stretch out and sleep if he liked. But he could not shake the need to get away from that frozen cemetery. Before he had left, he had walked all of Chryse’s decks, looking into as many faces as he could. Bayandi had names, but there would be no way to trace the origins of all of them, and Greg thought someone should take the time to memorialize them all.
He had Emily Broadmoor meet him by Ilyana’s cell. She had assigned Hirano to guard duty, and Greg returned the man’s salute, ignoring the haunted guilt in the young officer’s eyes. It would not matter, he realized, if he disciplined the man or not. Hirano would carry this as a failure forever, and how he processed that would dictate the direction of the rest of his life.
Greg watched Ilyana on the monitor. She had stopped humming, but was still seated at the table, staring straight ahead, her hands folded in front of her. She had that same serene look on her face, and Greg wondered, taking in her wide, absent eyes, how he could have missed the signs of utter devastation.
He knew devastation. But he had never known it at the level she had.
He stepped into the room and stood at the table, across from Ilyana. She looked up at him and smiled, that same polite, tranquil smile she had worn the day she had arrived. “Captain Foster,” she said. “Please, sit down.”
As if it were her home.
Greg nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and pulled out the opposite chair. Greeting him seemed like progress, and he hoped he wasn’t about to derail her again. He sat, and leaned forward, folding his hands to mirror her. “I’ve just come from Chryse,” he told her.
“Ah.” She smiled more widely. “I’m glad you’ve had a chance to see her. Did you speak with Captain Bayandi?”
“Briefly,” he said. “He told me what happened.”
No change in her expression. “It upset him very much at the time,” she said, lowering her voice as if in confidence. “It was days before he would speak to me. Even then he didn’t want to tell me, but in the end I got the story from him.” She shook her head. “It was very hard on him. He works so hard to protect us, you know.”
“Did you always know he was a machine?” Greg asked.
Ilyana nodded. “Oh, yes. I met him when I first came on board. It was a privilege. Not everybody knows, even now. Renate does, but she could hardly not; I had to bring her with me a lot, when she was little. When she was older, I could leave her with her friends. But then I missed her. Do you have children, Captain Foster?”
“No,” he said.
“We have more children than Meridia,” Ilyana said with pride, “and she has more people. The littlest was born—oh, what was it? Last January? She�
��d be five months now. Did you see her?”
“Yes,” Greg said. He had seen them all.
“I haven’t seen them in so long,” Ilyana said wistfully. “I used to visit, now and then, but even in an env suit I would get too cold. I kept asking Captain Bayandi to warm the place up, but he couldn’t. Something about resources.” She frowned. “He can be very stubborn. Like sending me here. I didn’t want to come.” She focused on Greg again. “I don’t mean that personally, Captain Foster. Your crew has been very kind. But I don’t like leaving my family. They need me, you see.”
“Captain Bayandi says he didn’t send you with a message,” Greg told her.
She leaned forward conspiratorially. “He wouldn’t, would he? He’s far more clever than you lot ever gave him credit for. He’s more clever than I am, by far. I had to figure it out for myself. He wouldn’t make me leave my family unless it was terribly important. And you were here, with Meridia, and when you didn’t understand, the message I needed to give you became clear. Do you understand the message, Captain?”
I understand nothing. “I thought I did,” Greg said. “You said we were too late. I thought you meant the Ellis experiments. The sabotage.”
Her smile brightened. “Oh, no. I mean, I can’t blame you for thinking that. That’s what I thought at first, too. But Ellis—if it was not them, it would be another. I meant all of us. We’re all going to die.”
“How?” Greg asked her.
“Don’t you see it? I can see it. I didn’t, at first. But if you look, you see the pattern. Things fall apart. Over and over again. We turn on each other. We kill. We die. And nothing we do changes that. It’s too late, Captain Foster. It’s always been too late. We’ve just been too foolish to see it.”
She sat back, satisfied, and it took Greg some time to work out why those words made him so angry. He agreed with them, didn’t he? Hadn’t he and Elena discussed just that? He had been a privileged kid, with every possible advantage, and he’d had his heart destroyed for the first time when he was twelve years old—ripped out by the sudden loss of his mother, and he had never had it back, not really. Instead he had watched it as if it were separate from him as it had been run over, time and again, by orders and missions and loss and everything he cared about that he couldn’t save. Elena. His father. Galileo, his ship, his home; and her crew, who trusted him. Even Herrod, so convinced that he could fix it all with just one more proffered sacrifice. All of them, standing up, again and again, no matter how certain the failure, and Greg along with them, because he didn’t know what else to do.
This woman was saying none of it mattered. That love didn’t matter, that friendship didn’t fix anything, that the bright, brief experience of life was unimportant. She was saying they should all give up.
“If it’s too late,” Greg asked her, “why did you kill Admiral Herrod?”
Ilyana frowned then, and for the first time her serene expression flickered. She glanced away, her eyes suddenly skipping around the room, dancing over the window and the ceiling and the small bed, resting on everything but Greg’s face. “She needs to succeed,” Ilyana said at last, the odd hesitance back in her speech.
“Who needs to succeed?”
“Chief Shaw.” Ilyana’s fingers clenched, and she shifted in her chair. Greg felt apprehension begin to tickle the back of his neck.
“Why?” When Ilyana said nothing, he pressed the issue. “If it’s too late, Commander, if we’re all going to die—why does she need to succeed? What does it accomplish if she succeeds?”
“She stops them.”
“You mean Ellis.”
Ilyana began to rock, just a little, back and forth. “Yes. She stops them, and they pay.”
“Pay for what, Commander?”
The rocking intensified. Ilyana took her hands off the table and hugged herself, her eyes out the window again.
“Commander. What happened? Why did you kill Admiral Herrod?”
“He would have told you,” she said softly, almost apologetically. “He said he wouldn’t, but he’s soft, and you matter to him, all of you on this ship. He would have told you, and you would have gone after her and stopped her, because you think you can fix it. You think you can fix everything. You think because you win small battles that you can win the war just by strength of will.” Her eyes snapped into Greg’s then, and her face was suddenly ugly, enraged. “You’re a fool, and I won’t have it, do you understand? Because they need to die.”
“We’re all going to die, remember?”
“They need to die first.”
He needed to push her. He needed to hear it. “Why?”
Ilyana’s teeth were clenched, and Greg couldn’t hear it at first; but slowly, it became audible: a keening, a high wail, first soft, in the back of her throat, and then louder, stronger, more shrill. And then she was screaming, over and over, rocking in the chair, rage and grief and something worse, all of her fractured humanity howling in that room.
And Greg, who had not four hours ago been ready to kill her, stood up, and walked around the table, and wrapped his arms around the wailing woman, and clung to her as she rocked and screamed over and over and over again, howling into a void nothing was ever going to fill.
“So Chryse has no crew,” Jessica concluded.
After everything he had just told her, that was her summary. “Not anymore, no,” he said.
“Then it’s Bayandi they want.”
Greg was sitting outside of Ilyana’s detention room, utterly drained of energy. Jessica had commed him while he was still holding Ilyana, and he had made her wait until Bob Hastings could arrive with a sedative. When Jessica had updated him with the situation on Yakutsk, he had suddenly wondered if his unwillingness to hurt Chryse was an error after all.
“He says,” Greg told Jessica, “that he’s being forced to come to Yakutsk. He can’t stop. He dropped out so I could get on board, but even that was difficult for him.” He closed his eyes, saw recent horrors, opened them again. “What happens after that he doesn’t know, but I don’t like the sound of those nukes.”
“They’re daisy-chained with the comms system,” Jessica told him. “But I don’t think they’re on a comms trigger.”
“Can you disarm them?”
“Working on it.” She sounded grim. “Gladkoff’s an asshole, but he’s an asshole with some knowledge. He’s bio-keyed them, which means we have to hack around them instead of disabling them, and that is going to take a while. And I’m not sure that’s a while we’ve got.”
“Keep on it, Jess,” he said, then frowned, puzzled. He could see the problem if Chryse was armed and aiming at Yakutsk, but this situation seemed exactly the opposite. “Did Gladkoff say why they wanted the artifact?”
“No. And that one worries me the most, Greg. It’s almost certainly Ellis tech, and Lanie’s got it. Have you found her yet?”
“No,” he told her. “But Bayandi’s looking into something for me. And we may still get a hit on the location of their lab.”
“Yes, sir.” She sounded as tired as he felt. “What’s going to happen to Ilyana, sir?”
“I’m going to talk to Taras,” he said. “Meridia should have the right facilities, or know someone who does.”
Jessica paused for a moment. “Greg. Are you okay?”
No, he was not. He had never been okay. All of his life he had been shattered, and he had never seen it until now. He fell back on the reflexive lie. “I’m fine, Jess. You watch your back. And tell Gladkoff if he goes after you again, I’ll come down there and kill him myself.”
Chapter 48
Indus Station
The man who addressed Elena had gray hair and a bland smile, and seemed neither alarmed nor suspicious.
“I—” Don’t panic. You are a vendor. You are benign. “I think my ship is having some trouble,” she told him truthfully. “It’s telling me it has a message, but I can’t get it to give it to me.”
“Yours is the shuttle in Five, right?�
��
She nodded. So much for lax security.
He frowned, but she thought he was only thinking about the problem. “That’s an older one. The eighteen series sometimes had comms glitches. When you get back, you should have them upgrade you.”
“No shit,” she said, “especially if it’s randomly talking to me.” She needed to get rid of him. “I suppose I should go back and find out what it wants.”
He gave her a smile. “It’s a long walk back. Let’s see if we can figure it out from here.”
Why is everyone here so accommodating? “I don’t want to trouble you,” she said.
“It’s no trouble. I’m a comms jockey on this station. I see hiccups like this all the time. I’ll bet we’ll have that message in two minutes, tops.”
He led her into another side room, a small utility station, smaller than the room where she had left Mika. If she knocked him out, she’d have nowhere to hide him. You’re a mechanic, she chided herself. Use your head. Try something other than drugging him. She stood, watching over his shoulder, as he pulled a spanner out of the kit around his wrist and opened a panel on the wall.
“Indus,” he said, “tie into . . . what’s your name?”
“Taylor,” she told him, and managed a smile. “Olivia.”
He returned the smile. “Tie into Olivia Taylor’s comm.”
“But—” She swallowed her objection. It’s all there, she thought. Everything I said to Wanderlust. Everything I stole from Mika. All of her original discussion with the shuttle, taking on her new identity, Herrod’s command code . . .
She should have blown the shuttle as soon as she arrived.
Her rescuer didn’t notice her reaction. “Indus, can you capture the message Wanderlust is trying to send?”
There was a pause, and this time the man did frown. “No message from Wanderlust,” the station said. It was the voice she had heard the second time, monotonic and bland.
“It’s on the comm,” she objected, and the man held up a hand.
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