Oarig, governor of Baikul, had only had the job for two weeks, having obtained it by summarily ejecting his predecessor and her cabinet from the office—a move widely anticipated after the terraformer failure. While this was not an atypical method for Yakutsk to change governing bodies, Oarig’s qualifications were difficult to understand. He was short-tempered, entitled, and inclined to violence. Greg was not entirely sure how he had amassed enough dedicated followers to kill for him.
“They’ve got wind of a food drop at Smolensk,” Jessica told him, “and they’re threatening to steal it.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Oarig, of course, having no trust in the fact that the supplies are going to be shared.” Which was not entirely unreasonable of him, despite his hair trigger—Villipova, the governor of Smolensk, was not above denying Baikul resources she had previously agreed to distribute evenly.
Jessica shrugged. “Hard to say. He’s paranoid, sure; but really, Greg, I think he’s just been planning a coup for so long he doesn’t know what else to do with himself.”
Which, Greg thought, made a succinct summation of Oarig’s personality. “Budapest dropped the cargo yesterday, didn’t they? So we need to figure out how to alert Villipova without—”
“Actually, sir,” Jessica interrupted, “Budapest is still there.”
Well, hell.
He turned away from her. Most of his crew considered him stoic, even cold; but Jessica could read him too well. She would know what he was thinking. He didn’t need her to see it in his eyes as well. “They should have been out of there ten hours ago.”
“They got delayed,” she told him. “They did airlift assist at Govi. There were … complications.”
“Anybody get hurt?”
“Not those kinds of complications.”
He knew instantly what had happened. Airlift assist meant hands-off recon. Civilian freighters often served that purpose during an evac, using pilots of various experience levels to scan a colony’s surface for people in distress. The protocol was to notify the lead airlift ship when a group was found, and move on.
But Elena would never have left anyone in trouble.
“We’ve got to tell Savosky.” He headed through the inner door to his office, Jessica at his heels. “He needs to abort that cargo drop.”
He heard her step behind him. “I talked to Yuri a few minutes ago. They’re already down on the surface. Import is arguing with them about where they want the cargo delivered.”
“The correct answer,” Greg said, “is they leave it where it is and let Smolensk sort it out.” Civilians. Dammit. He hit his internal comm. “Samaras, get me Budapest.”
But Jessica wasn’t finished. “You’re not going to talk them out of it,” she said. “I tried. If the import office doesn’t certify receipt, they don’t get paid.”
“And they’re willing to risk their lives for that?”
“Apparently so.”
Shit. “Belay that last order, Samaras,” he said, and instead commed Emily Broadmoor, his security chief. “Emily, I need a shuttle and a security detail.” He met Jessica’s eyes. “How far are we out?”
“Twenty minutes,” she told him.
“Twenty minutes,” he said to Emily. When she acknowledged, he turned back to Jessica. “I’m going to get Herrod. Might as well at least maintain the fiction of having diplomacy on the table. You—” He stopped. “Contact Savosky. Tell him we’re sending backup.”
“Yes, sir. Greg—”
He met her eyes. “No time for that now, Jess,” he said, and after a moment she nodded.
“I’ll alert Savosky, sir.” She turned and left.
Greg left the office and headed back to the gym, putting all the pieces together in his head. Savosky had dropped cargo in some pretty ugly places in the past, and he was well aware of the political situation on Yakutsk. If he was moving forward despite Jessica’s warning, then the payoff must be genuinely impressive. Savosky was not naive, and he was not helpless.
And he had at least one pilot who wasn’t a civilian at all.
Past is past, Greg told himself.
But it wasn’t, and he knew it.
Yakutsk
Bear’s nose wrinkled. “Elena, what the hell am I smelling?”
Elena looked down at herself. Her once pristine env suit was covered in the red-gray dust of Yakutsk’s exposed surface, and her arms were caked up to her elbows with muck from the heap of organic material through which she had been digging for the last ten minutes. Her own nose had stopped working shortly after she started, and she was grateful; she didn’t think she could otherwise have done the job without getting sick.
“Compost,” she said. “Also, cat excrement. I think.”
“There some big reason we’re all going to have to sit with that on the way back to Budapest?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the container she had found buried in the garbage. “Jamyung’s dead,” she told him. “And this is what he left me.”
“He left it to you buried in cat shit?”
She tucked it back into her pocket. “It’s a long story,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
She had heard him shouting as she came up the road, his bellowing punctuated by barely audible, utterly unconcerned responses from the import official. When she arrived, the official was walking out the back door, the office itself dark.
Bear grew serious. “We’ve got two problems,” he told her. “First, they want the cargo dropped at the cultivation dome. Second, the Corps has intel suggesting Baikul wants to steal the cargo. I’ll leave the exercise of which is more important to the pilot.”
She raised her eyebrows. Since the population had moved back into the domes, everything on the surface was disputed territory. The cultivation dome itself was jointly held, but they would have to fly over a substantial amount of open landscape to get there, which would expose them to any ground-to-air fire Baikul chose to throw at them. Worse, the cultivation dome had no established infrastructure or procedures for docking a large-scale cargo ship. They would have to unload cargo without any environmental controls, doing all the work in env suits. They would be almost completely defenseless.
She felt a tingle in her spine. She had been trained for this.
“Let me fly it alone, Bear,” she said. When he looked away, she pressed her argument. “Out in the natural gravity, the size of those cargo crates isn’t going to bother me at all. I’ve got the training to fly this kind of mission.”
“Chiedza’s flown combat,” he said.
“Not like this.” Elena didn’t think the combat Chiedza had flown would have involved much defense. “There’s no reason to put everyone through this. Pull the extraneous crap from one shuttle, pack all the cargo on it, and I’ll take it out and be back within the hour.”
He was still frowning, but she could see it on his face: he knew this was his best choice. Curtly, he nodded. “No risks, though,” he added, unable to resist one last admonishment. “And no detours. You drop that fucking cargo and you get the fuck out. Understood?”
“Understood.”