“Fuck you, Greg. Stay safe, and get back here, because I want to wring your fucking neck in person.”
And at that, his shuddering breath turned into laughter.
Chapter 52
Yakutsk
Jessica looked at her hands.
She had been told, all of her life, that her hands were small. Jessica herself was small, but she had never felt that way. She was exactly the size she was; it was only that most other people were bigger, some by quite a bit. She had met some, from time to time—Bear Savosky, for one—who were so impossibly huge she couldn’t really believe they were of the same species. She’d had lovers who dwarfed her, who’d been afraid they might hurt her until she had reassured them.
She was not small. She was herself, the size that she was, and it was enough.
It would have to be.
She hit her comm. “Galileo, this is—” What do I even call myself? She gave up. “Samaras, can you get Commander Broadmoor for me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said steadily. Good man in a crisis, Samaras. She would have to remember to tell him so. It was her job to look after him now.
Emily was quick. “Yes, Captain?” she said.
And there it was. “Did he tell you,” Jessica said wearily, “or did you pick it up in the paperwork?”
“I was notified as soon as he entered his resignation officially,” Emily said. “And between us, ma’am, I’m not surprised by any of it.” If Jessica hadn’t known better, she would have thought Emily Broadmoor was proud of what Greg had done. “Do you want me to wait to notify the crew?”
Jessica suspected it had hit the rumor mill already. “No,” she said. “I’ll speak to them in a moment. First, though, I need Galileo on battle alert. Chryse’s due soon, and I don’t know what’s going to happen when she arrives. We need to be ready to take her out if she becomes a threat.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“We don’t know her capabilities,” Jessica warned, “but the captain”—what else am I supposed to call him?—“has some intelligence suggesting they may outgun us.”
“Unusual for a PSI ship,” Emily remarked, but she didn’t sound alarmed. “We’ll be ready for her, ma’am.”
“Thank you. Commander, how widely known is the Admiralty’s involvement in Athena Relay?”
“It’s still at the rumor mill level, ma’am, but most of them have heard it by now.”
Okay. She took a breath. She wasn’t sure she’d breathed properly since she got off the line with Greg. “Put me on ship-wide, will you, Emily?” Commander. You should call her Commander. She’s earned it.
But Commander Broadmoor forgave her the mistake. “Go ahead, Captain.”
Jessica looked at her hands again.
Let’s go.
“All hands, this is Jessica Lockwood.” Enough hedging. There was no changing it now, anyway. “A few minutes ago, Captain Foster officially resigned his military commission in order to distance Galileo and her crew from the consequences of pursuing the mission to eliminate the threat of the Olam Fleet, a task he was explicitly forbidden by the Admiralty to pursue. Prior to his resignation, he promoted me, and put me in charge of Galileo.
“I know how you’re all feeling right now.” That was a lie. She didn’t even know how she was feeling right now. “Your loyalty to the Admiralty is strained, at best. But I would ask that you set aside your resentments and remember why we’re here. It’s not for the Admiralty, or for glory, or even for ourselves.” Or Greg Foster. “We’re here to keep these colonists safe. Right now, Ellis Systems is luring a PSI ship to this location with the express purpose of capturing it for their own uses. Regardless of the Admiralty’s crimes, we all know what Ellis is capable of. We will remember who we are, and how we’ve been trained, and we’ll do what we’ve always done: work together, and stop them.
“I have high hopes this won’t come to battle at all,” she said. “But if it does, I have no doubt that each one of you will rise to the occasion, do your best, and fight as a team, as you always do. I can’t tell you, right now, if this is a skirmish or a war; but I can tell you, as long as we hang on to each other, we’ll win.
“Captain Lockwood out.”
The voice came from behind her. “Good speech,” Dallas said.
She turned and found the scavenger leaning against the wall, relaxed as always. “Thanks,” she said. Then: “I didn’t want this.”
Dallas shrugged. “Life goes that way sometimes.”
She wondered if, with repetition, she would find Dallas’s quiet acceptance too passive. At the moment, however, it was reassuring. “So as it happens,” she said, straightening, “I’ve got a little more authority here now.” Even Chemeris’s tepid order was working in her favor. “We need to evacuate the domes.”
Dallas’s eyebrows shot up. “Not going to fly.”
Not the first time colonists have refused to act in the interest of their own safety. “Gladkoff is sitting in there, smug as hell, certain those nukes aren’t going to go off. But Gladkoff is an idiot, and seriously, Dallas, these are nukes. In a domed city. Overkill, but the end result is the same: lots of vacuum, very fast. Efficient little bastards, nukes.”
“People live here.”
“I’m not talking about a permanent evacuation.” She strode around Dallas to the end of the alley, looking up and down the road. She was disoriented.
“Jessica.”
“I’ll bring some ships down. We need to get people to the spaceport.”
“Jessica.”
She stopped, and looked around.
“They don’t trust Central,” Dallas explained. “They’re not going to climb on Corps ships. Doesn’t matter if you say ‘nukes,’ it’s not happening.”
She caught herself before she reached up and rubbed her eyes. “Okay, then,” she said. “You must have transports of your own. You salvage from orbit, too, don’t you? And some of your manufacturing takes place on ships, doesn’t it?” When Dallas nodded, she said, “Then take those. It doesn’t matter how: people need to get off this rock.”
“Who’s going to tell them this? They’re not going to listen.”
“You need to make them listen.”
“This isn’t the Corps. I can’t just declare myself the boss.”
“That’s how everybody on this colony ends up in charge, isn’t it?” Dallas’s eyebrows climbed at her remark. “I’ve seen you with them, Dallas. They respect you.” Dallas looked away, and she wanted to use her small hands to throw a punch. “And you can cut that shit. You think I’m standing here thrilled to pieces because someone put me in charge? I hate this. I don’t want to be the one standing up and telling people what to do. But you know what? Someone has to do it, and I can, and my people listen to me. And right now, Dallas, you need to stand up and make your people listen to you, because I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know if any of us can stop it, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand here watching you wring your hands while we all die.”
Dallas’s impressive glare, she realized, rivaled Greg Foster’s. Jessica had never thought much of her own glare, but she had found, over the last couple of years, that she had power of her own. So she stood her ground, and glared back.
And then, without comment, Dallas straightened, looked away, and nodded.
“Good.” She turned to head back into the environmental room. “I’m going to keep on Gladkoff. You get as many people off the surface as you can. And contact Bristol anyway. You may need the ships.” Before Dallas could speak, she glared again. “I don’t want to hear again how we’re off-worlders. There’s only one enemy here, and it’s not the Corps.”
Dallas straightened, and saluted, and she found herself rather pleased that after such a brief acquaintance she could recognize sarcasm. But she saluted back anyway, then returned to their prisoner.
Chapter 53
Indus Station
Elena had spent the first several minutes banging on the door and yel
ling anything she thought might make them listen to her.
She started with the truth: “I’ve sabotaged the station!” she yelled. “If someone doesn’t stop it, this whole place is going up!” She didn’t say she wasn’t sure she could stop it at all. That would depend entirely on the power of the shielding, and how well-constructed their connecting conduits were. She could only hope, on an Ellis research station, that they’d gone for super-paranoid over-insulated conduits. If they restored the battery shielding, the conduits might not give, and the station might be salvageable.
None of which mattered if she couldn’t get out.
The door was solid, with no window, and she had no idea how thick it was. The room she was in was tiny, barely large enough for the table and single chair shoved against one wall. She supposed she should be grateful there was a light, from a single anemic panel on the ceiling, but she suspected it wasn’t a massive improvement over full dark. Dank. Why did cells always look dank?
She returned to yelling, resorting to threats and fictions.
“My shuttle is rigged to blow, and I’m the only one who can stop it!”
“I’m here on a special mission from Ellis Headquarters!”
“Please, I’m having an allergic reaction, and I can’t breathe in here!”
But there was nothing, no sound, no footsteps, no answers.
They had left her comm, but she had no doubt it was being monitored. Even if she could speak to the artifact—and how was she supposed to do that, without addressing the entire system?—nothing she said would help. She hadn’t hacked software; she had taken down an entire shielding system. Unless the artifact grew hands and a spanner, there was nothing it could do, either.
But the artifact had capabilities beyond basic hardware.
“Can you warn them?” she said, not bothering to shout. “Can you do something, say something, give some alarm that will at least get them off the station?”
Silence. Perhaps her comm was blocked after all. She felt abruptly furious, and she turned and pounded on the door again. I didn’t have to kill these people, she thought. I didn’t have to die. Herrod lied to me, and now this, and it’s all useless. She wanted to bang on the door until her hands were bleeding and numb.
And then, abruptly, the door slid open, and a hand caught her arm mid-swing.
He was her height, more or less, with white hair and wrinkled skin, darkened by age or nature she could not say. He had full, fleshy lips, curving downward, and a narrow, straight nose. And his eyes. Elena knew better than to judge someone by a single expression . . . but this man’s eyes, as they took in her face, were cold, detached, and very slightly bored. She repressed a shiver and stared back, willing her own expression into that same detachment, and waited.
He let go of her arm. “Why don’t you sit?” he said. “We’ll be talking for quite some time.”
“No, we won’t.” Creepy and cold or not, at least he was listening. “The station’s been sabotaged. If you don’t get to the power core in”—she did some quick math in her head—“ten minutes, fifteen at the outside, you’re not going to be able to stop it at all.”
His expression did not change. “I said, why don’t you sit?” And so quickly she didn’t see it coming, he slapped her across the face.
She stumbled, reaching out instinctively to brace herself against the wall. A good hit, she thought, detached; her vision went briefly double, and a spot around her molars had gone numb. He had not, it seemed, entered the room in answer to her pleas. “You can beat me up all you like,” she told him. “The story doesn’t change. This place is going up, and you need to stop it.”
He stared at her for a moment, then hit the comm behind his ear. “Cage,” he said, “check the power systems.” He lifted his chin at her. “Sit down.”
She blinked again. Her vision was clearing, but she thought sitting was probably not the worst idea. She lowered herself into the chair by the table.
“Who are you?” he asked.
This part was easy. This part was unchanged. She might be able to save this man’s life, and the lives of the others on the station, but Ellis was still the enemy. “I’m not going to tell you who I am.”
“Then why tell me what you’ve done?”
“Because,” she said, as patiently as she could, “I’d rather not see anybody else die. Which I know isn’t a concern of yours, but we’re not all inhuman bastards.”
His eyebrows went up, and a hint of amusement hit those cold eyes. It didn’t improve his expression. “As you’ve just confessed to coming here to kill us all,” he pointed out, “I’m not sure you’re in much of a place to judge.” He hit her again, this time on the other side. “Who are you?”
That slap was not quite as effective, but it still smarted. “I’m nobody.”
“We do not let nobodies in here. You came in on a provision ship. How did you get past our background checks?”
“You are wasting time,” she said, her frustration building. “You need to stop the overload!”
“My people tell me there is no overload.”
“Then they are idiots.” They were depending on readouts, she suspected. And . . . could the artifact be covering for her? It’s not alive, she reminded herself. It’s not like it would understand the subtleties. Or maybe Herrod designed it to make sure everything happened this way. “Tell them to look at the thing. Not just the reports, not just the indicators. Go into that room and look at the fucking battery.”
This time it was a punch and not a slap. Her vision dimmed briefly, and when it returned, she could not focus at all. “What are you trying to distract me from?” he shouted. “What are you trying to keep me from finding?”
She closed her eyes against intensifying nausea. “Nothing.” Then she remembered. “The fleet,” she told him. “I’ve destroyed the fleet.”
And that provoked a reaction. Those cold eyes grew wider, and a glimmer of heat, sharp and angry, crept in around the edges. “Cage,” he said to his comm. “Find the fleet. Now.”
“The battery sabotage was only a backup,” she told him. No need for him to know that she’d been lied to, that she’d trusted the wrong people, that she’d fucked this up from the beginning. “With the fleet gone, there’s no need for the station to be destroyed. Please.” She didn’t need to exaggerate the pain in her voice. “Send someone to look at the battery. You need to put a field around it. You need—”
But her interrogator wasn’t listening to her. Those lips grew longer, thinner; those eyes grew angrier, cold and hot at the same time, a hint of madness around the corner. You don’t lose often, do you? she thought, just as he rounded on her.
“Where did you send the fleet?” he demanded.
“It’s not relevant!” she shouted back. “They’re gone, and you need to—”
He hit her again. “You do not decide what you do and do not tell me. Where is the fleet?”
That punch made her bite her tongue, and the pain briefly cleared her head. “If you keep hitting me like that, I won’t be telling you anything either way.” She reached up to rub her jaw. “You know where the fleet is.” Those people are already dead. The rest of you don’t have to be.
He straightened, his fury barely contained. “The warship made it to Earth, you know,” he told her conversationally. “All of this, everything you’ve done? Pointless. Earth can’t stand against a warship.”
My mother. He had to be wrong. Earth had defenses. What she had done was give them a fighting chance. “I suppose I’ll never know,” she said. “But of course, neither will you. Unless you get someone to check that battery.”
“You’re a liar,” he said to her. “This is a trap.”
“It’s only a trap if I’ve somehow managed to rig the battery to go up when someone looks at it.” Please, she thought at him. Please, even if you kill me, please get these people out of here.
It took him an eternity to nod his head.
Chapter 54
Yakutsk
Gladkoff, still in handcuffs, made a great show of checking the time. “Nearly there,” he said comfortably.
This asshole, Jessica thought, would find a glare from her nothing but a victory at this point. Instead she briefly met Bristol’s eyes, and watched as he edged, very subtly, closer to where Gladkoff was standing. The Ellis salesman twitched and glanced over, his eyes taking in Bristol’s weapon, pointed politely at the floor. Gladkoff blanched, just a little, and looked away, and Jessica felt very slightly better.
Dallas had had moderate success convincing the colonists to remove themselves from the surface. Forty-seven Smolensk ships, mostly maintenance trawlers and tugboats, were now hovering above the little moon, carrying nearly two thousand people—more than ten percent of the city’s population. But she had been truly surprised to see another three dozen ships—all of them smaller, but still—lift off from Baikul. Eight of them had stopped at Smolensk to take on extra passengers. Baikul had found no nukes in their systems, but there was enough new Ellis hardware that even Oarig had become suspicious. He had contacted Villipova, and in three minutes they had hashed out what the two domes hadn’t done in twelve decades: a binding cease-fire. Baikul had offered the extra space on their ships, and in return, Villipova had pledged all necessary medical aid, should the situation become violent.
Jessica suspected most of the people who had been fighting on the moon’s surface were still squabbling, but this was more of a step toward peace than she had thought they would ever see. Ellis Systems, everyone’s common enemy.
She hoped she’d live long enough to be smug about it.
“Captain.” Emily’s voice in her ear, and it still took her a moment to remember she wasn’t listening in on one of Greg’s calls. “Chryse is coming out of the field. She’s on the other side of the moon.”
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