Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  Dallas was not sure Gladkoff had earned a trial. Gladkoff was not one of the individuals who had thrown Martine outside, who had dragged Jamyung out as he screamed, but he worked with the ones who had. Who are we going to be? Dallas thought.

  Not a city where one person decided the fate of a killer.

  “Not entirely my call,” Dallas said at last, and something at the corners of Jessica’s green eyes relaxed.

  “I’ve made my request,” she said. “My obligation is completed.” She shot Gladkoff a look. “You could always ask for extradition to the Corps justice system. Or PSI’s. But I suspect you’ll get a better deal here.” She hit her comm. “Lockwood to Galileo.”

  “Yes, Captain.” That was her Lieutenant Samaras. Apparently he had adapted to Jessica’s title quickly—more quickly, Dallas thought, than Jessica was going to. But all she did was smile.

  “Stand down from alert status,” she told her starship. “Chryse is no longer a danger.”

  Chapter 61

  Budapest

  The light faded, and the ship stabilized, and they were cruising sedately toward Budapest’s landing bay.

  For the moment, Greg was still alive. With any luck, we both are.

  He climbed to his feet and turned. Most of his passengers were on the floor, and some were bleeding; but they were all moving, and that was the best he could hope for. He counted quickly: seventeen. He wondered how many had been left behind, lost. He wondered how these people were feeling, whether they were defensive, belligerent, guiltless, frightened.

  “Anybody armed?” he asked.

  Hesitantly, three people raised their hands.

  They did not protest as he relieved them of two hand weapons and a folding knife. He pocketed the contraband, and stepped to the back of the ship, opening the first aid kit. “Who’s got medical knowledge?” he asked.

  It turned out six of them had been trained in rudimentary first aid, apparently as a requirement for the job. He did not ask about their employer, or what they had been up to; instead, he worked with them, attending to the wounded, disinfecting cuts and applying analgesics to bruises. There was miraculously only one broken bone, and the woman had obtained it not on the station, but when their shuttle had pitched and rolled in the shock wave. He gave her a strong painkiller, and promised her Galileo’s doctor would look after her.

  Punishments could come later. Right now, they were refugees.

  “Are we under arrest?” someone asked.

  “I don’t know,” Greg told them truthfully. “I don’t think too many people are going to be happy about what was going on at that station.”

  “We were doing research,” said someone else. Greg shot him a glance, and he fell silent.

  “Right now,” he told them, “I think we should focus on the injured and the dead. We’ll need your help figuring out who’s missing. And if anybody’s signed any kind of nondisclosure or binding contract that’s going to keep them from doing that,” he added, anticipating the objection, “call your fucking lawyer after we’ve cleaned up this mess.”

  The shuttle landed back on Budapest, and he ushered the passengers out into the landing bay, where the others had set up a triage station of sorts. Savosky was there, looking people over one by one, bandaging small wounds and directing others to help more seriously injured people down the hallway to the infirmary. Fuck them, Greg thought. What about Elena? But he didn’t say it out loud.

  He pushed past the crowds, climbing a utility ladder to the upper level so he could run down the hallway without tripping over the wounded. On the other end of the ship he climbed down again, and rounded the corner into the infirmary.

  And there she was.

  She was lying on a table, and Arin was hovering over her with a cloth, gently cleaning her face. He looked up as Greg came in. “I’ve stabilized her,” he said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

  Most of it, it seemed, was all over her: her clothes, the white uniform she’d worn as camouflage, were soaked with it. Some of the stains had charred. There were solid chunks of flesh clinging to her as well, and he frowned, eyes sweeping over her. Her hands and feet were intact, as was her head; much of her hair had burned off, and her face was blackened on one side, but he couldn’t see anything missing. Arin, who was following his eyes, said, “That’s not hers. I don’t know whose it was, but it’s not hers.”

  “The blood?” Greg asked.

  “Mostly not hers, either,” Arin said. But his voice wasn’t encouraging. “You can come closer,” the boy told him.

  Greg stepped up to the table, looking at her face. Under the blood and burns, it was her: lips blistered, cheeks bruised, one eyebrow scorched off, but still her. His Elena, her flesh and bones, battered and damaged and unconscious, but still alive, still breathing, still with him, if only for now.

  Arin put his rag down and left the room to help Bear with the incoming casualties.

  Greg looked down at her.

  “You,” he said, “are a fucking idiot, and such a massive pain in the ass I can’t even begin to express it.”

  But that didn’t seem right.

  “I have never hated anyone as much as I hate you right now.”

  Still not quite it.

  “My mother. I’ve hated my mother. You know how much I’ve hated my mother. So maybe . . . maybe I hated her more. But if you don’t come back, it’s going to be a close contest, Elena.”

  He reached out and touched her hair. It was soaked in blood, turning the blue streaks dark purple. “I would have come with you. You think I would have stopped you, but I would have come with you. You wouldn’t have been alone.” He felt tears on his face, but he didn’t know why. “Why do you always think you have to be alone?”

  His comm chimed. “Foster,” Savosky told him, “Syncos has got a temporary relay up.”

  I don’t care. But he said, “That’s good.”

  “And you’ve got an incoming comm from some Admiral called Waris.”

  “Tell her I don’t work for her anymore,” Greg said. He stroked Elena’s head gently, as if it might break under his fingers.

  “Pretty sure that’s why she wants to talk to you.”

  He supposed it was unfair to make Savosky deal with Waris. “Fine.” He touched Elena’s cheek, the one that was not blistered. “Put her through.”

  “Captain Foster,” Waris began, audibly apoplectic, “if you think this resignation of yours is going to shield you from anything, you’re—”

  “Admiral,” he interrupted, brushing Elena’s forehead with his thumb, “I told Savosky to put you through because it’s not on him to defend me, but I’m going to say my piece, and that will be the end of the discussion. I have resigned my Corps commission. You want to see that as treason, or insubordination, or whatever bullshit you want to spin, take your best shot: it’s not going to work. My resignation is regulation, legal, and by the book. On top of that, here we are in the Fourth Sector, with nobody to court-martial me even if you wanted to piss with the rules and give that a try. So I’m telling you, for the first and last time: fuck off, Admiral. You have no power over me anymore.”

  He ended the comm.

  “Wish you could have heard that,” he told Elena, and went back to stroking what was left of her hair.

  Chapter 62

  Yakutsk

  “You should see this place,” Jessica said to Ted. “I’ve never seen a repair shop so busy.”

  Indeed, the mood in Smolensk had been positively celebratory since Chryse had nearly destroyed them all. The ships had landed, returning the colonists to their homes, and people from Smolensk and Baikul together started picking up debris from where the shooting and bombing had happened. Villipova and Gladkoff were both under arrest, and the one time Jessica had been worried was when the celebratory tone turned hostile, and the crowd seemed determined to vacate Gladkoff.

  But Dallas, soft-spoken and respected, had asked a question: “Have you ever seen anyone vacated? Because I have. And
I don’t want to see it again.”

  Gladkoff had been remanded to a makeshift jail—Jessica realized, with some surprise, that they had no actual prison system—and the talk had turned to the various legal violations he could be charged with.

  Villipova, Jessica thought, might actually keep her post. She had been furious about Gladkoff, and plausibly ignorant of his plan to use Yakutsk to lure Bayandi into Ellis’s hands. When she heard he was responsible for the deaths of Martine and Jamyung, she had expressed, in fairly colorful language, the same desires Dallas’s mob had. Jessica found herself believing the woman might actually be innocent in this situation—or as innocent as she could be, with her history of corruption. Jessica hoped Smolensk wouldn’t succumb to mob rule again, because if nothing else, Villipova certainly had experience making a bureaucracy work.

  Oarig had come out of it all smelling like a hero, both for sending ships to help evacuate, and for not being the one dealing with Ellis to begin with. He, Jessica thought, was more worrisome. She didn’t think for a second he had really learned from what had happened. But if enough of the colonists had, she supposed that might be enough.

  “It’s that way here, too.” Ted sounded tired and subdued. “The new relay is pretty flaky, and it’s not processing nearly as much as it needs to. People are queuing up to send messages, and we’ve been receiving data nonstop since the link went up. We’ll be weeks sorting through it all.”

  “How about everything else?”

  “Some of them want to blame the whole Admiralty for this,” he said. “Some of them just want to blame Shadow Ops. And then the arguments start about who’s who, and there’s a lot of things said that I’m not going to repeat to their commanding officer.”

  She sighed. “I’ll be back in an hour, Ted,” she promised. “I just need to wrap up down here.” She had been avoiding the question. “How’s Elena?”

  “Alive. Unconscious.”

  “What does Bob say?”

  “He says he doesn’t know.” Ted sounded miserable, and Jessica was reminded that he had known Elena since the Academy, longer than any of them had known her, even Greg. “He says her brain is resting, and healing itself, but he can’t say how long it’ll take.”

  “If anybody can get through this,” Jessica told Ted, “Elena can. You know that.”

  Ted paused. “I’m kind of mad at her, really,” he confessed. “She could have told us.”

  “Yeah.” Jessica knew exactly what he was feeling. And she knew exactly why Elena had not said anything. “We can give her shit when she wakes up. For years, maybe.”

  And she remembered, then, that Elena was not in the Corps any longer, and neither was Greg, and Galileo belonged to her and she was not sure how much treason her chain of command was actually behind. I’ll never be the officer Greg was, she realized. I’ll never have that blind trust.

  She wasn’t sure if that was a strength or a weakness.

  She stood, and stretched, and walked over to where Bristol was talking with the rest of the infantry. “We about ready?” she asked him.

  “Yes, Captain.” Bristol, of all of them, had seemed to absorb her promotion the most seamlessly.

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  She found Dallas at Jamyung’s shop, sorting through the piles of parts in the yard. Half, she could tell, were being tossed into a waste pile. The rest Dallas would examine, and scan with a portable analyzer, and place carefully on an anti-grav skiff.

  She watched for a moment, taking time she didn’t have. She was dreading this conversation, and not for its content. She did not want to have a last conversation with Dallas.

  “Who owns all of this now?” she asked.

  “We do.” Dallas picked up another part, turned it over, and tossed it into the trash pile. “The scavengers.”

  “Is that part of the arrangement between Smolensk and Baikul?” she asked.

  Dallas looked at her as if she had asked something absurd, but the answer was perfectly polite. “This is old law. The scavengers provide the dealers with parts to sell—not all of them, but enough. So if a dealer dies without a business partner, the scavengers get the inventory. We have to split it,” Dallas added, sounding amused, “and that sometimes gets interesting.”

  She took a step closer. “Lanie always says good dealers don’t leave their valuables out in the yard.”

  “Basement’s been picked over.” Dallas sounded disapproving. “While some of us were trying to save the dome, someone came back here and cleaned it out.”

  Including, she realized, the scanner that erroneously picked up dellinium. She would never be able to analyze it now. Neither could she analyze the object, that strange artifact, now vapor in the vastness of dead space.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Figured.” Another part tossed onto the waste pile.

  “Galileo’s not leaving yet,” she added. “We’ve—there’s a lot that’s happened since we lost contact with the First Sector, and I’m not inclined to run off to another assignment until we’ve worked that out. And our mission here—” What the hell had that been? Keep the governors safe? It all seemed like bullshit now. “I want to make sure everything’s okay here.”

  “That your call, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s yours. But it’s my call who I trust.”

  “You trust your Admiralty?”

  She closed her eyes. That was too much to process just now. “I trust my crew,” she said simply. “And right now, I need to be there with them. They need to see me standing in front of them, being in command.”

  “Captain Lockwood.” Dallas smiled, and she laughed.

  “Do you know,” she said, “it’s the last thing I wanted? I made lieutenant commander after seven years, and that was good enough for me. Then Greg made me his second, and I could have strangled him. Now—”

  “You’re still going to strangle him.”

  “If I get the chance, yes.” She would not strangle Greg when he was worried about Elena, but she had hope she would get the opportunity later on. “It seems surreal, almost. They’ve followed me, these people. I’m not always sure why.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Those warm dark eyes, always so patient. “I do my best for them,” she said. “I make the best choices I can.”

  “Seem to do okay with that.”

  “I guess.” She took the chance. “So will you.”

  Something in Dallas’s posture wilted, just a little. “Don’t want people following me.”

  “Sometimes we don’t get to choose.”

  “I’m good at my job. I like my job.” Dallas threw a part aggressively into the trash. “Should be enough.”

  “You want to run away,” she offered, “you can come with us.”

  At that, Dallas looked surprised, and stared into her eyes for a long moment, evaluating how serious she was. At length, Dallas smiled, just a little. “Starship is almost like a dome,” Dallas allowed. “But it’s not the same.”

  “Home is home,” she said. She was disappointed. She was relieved.

  “Yeah.” Dallas tossed one more part onto the skiff, then turned around to face her. “Never dealt much with soldiers,” Dallas admitted. “Stay away from off-worlders, most of the time. They all like you?”

  “God, I hope not.” And this time Dallas laughed.

  “Listen. You get your command straightened out, find yourself with a little time on your hands—I could cook for you again. Maybe something a little nicer. Or there’s the pub.”

  “Is their food any good?”

  “It’s awful, but I don’t have to cook it.”

  Hell. “I’m going to miss you.”

  Dallas nodded. “I’ll miss you, too, Captain.”

  “I like Jessica better.”

  “Jessica, then.”

  And Dallas took her hands, and Jessica realized they fit perfectly within the scavenger’s long, lovely fingers, and she thought, just maybe, she might make all of
this work out after all.

  Chapter 63

  Galileo

  He would not have left Elena’s side for anything else.

  “She’s stable, Greg,” Bob assured him. “You can take the time.”

  But that wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t the time that worried him. He believed Bob when he said she would live, although the doctor could not say when—or even if—she would wake up again. Greg was fighting some strange, primitive compulsion to keep looking at her, as if she would disappear again if he closed his eyes. If he sat with her, held her hand, she would not drop out of his life and leave him rootless.

  “I made a promise,” he told her, before he left. “I’ll be back.”

  Elena slept on.

  He ended up back in his old office. Jessica, somewhat to his annoyance, was refusing to take possession of it, instead setting up a temporary workstation in the pub. “It’s easier for them to find me here,” she had argued. “And I need to be as visible as possible right now, while people adjust.” He would have gone mad, trying to work in such a public place; but she seemed to thrive on the chaos, her mind getting sharper and more organized the more people peppered her with irrelevant questions. She had recruited Emily Broadmoor to help her, but he suspected eventually she’d choose Ted Shimada as a second-in-command. Ted knew her, and loved her, and called her on her shit, and if Greg were to advise her on the subject, he would tell her those were the three most important attributes a first officer could have.

  He should have found it odd, being back on Galileo, passing people in the hallways, knowing he was not a soldier anymore. But the whole situation felt strangely comfortable, as if he had finally slipped into place after years of sitting precariously on the edge. People still saluted him, and he saluted them back, the echo of a habit that would take time to fade; but they also talked to him, many of them far more openly than they had ever done before. They were, each of them, going through so much, and Greg wasn’t going to hazard a guess what they would do next.