Greg lifted them off slowly, most likely in deference to the people on the ground, but Elena didn’t think his consideration would be necessary much longer. She had seen far too many squabbles go this way. In a few minutes, Yakutsk would be down five-hundred-odd colonists, and the dome governments would be back to accusations and raids. Or worse.
And she wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to help.
She sat on the floor next to Arin, gripping the bench as the shuttle rose through Yakutsk’s light gravity and began generating its own field, stabilizing them. Shit. She was going to have to comm Bear.
“Greg,” she said, “can I have comms control?”
Across from her, Admiral Herrod sat in silence. She wanted to tell him to say something; his silence was unnerving. But he had helped, she realized. He had kept the shooters off them long enough for them to get Arin to safety. He had done something good.
Even a stopped clock is right once a day.
“Go ahead,” Greg said from the pilot’s cabin.
Bear picked up almost immediately. “Shaw? What the fuck? Have you got Arin?”
“He’s here,” she said. “He’s safe. We’re headed back to Galileo.”
“Fuck Galileo,” Bear snapped. “You need to get your ass back here. Did you drop those supplies?”
“He’s injured, Bear.”
Bear went silent for a moment. “How bad?”
Even with her isolated existence, Elena knew the tone: the stomach-knotting fear of a parent too far from a sick child. “He’s talking,” Greg interceded. “He was steady as a rock out there.”
“I’m fine,” Arin said, trying to sound reassuring.
But Bear didn’t want their reassurances. “Elena?”
“He’s got a concussion,” she said, “and I think a ruptured spleen. But the internal bleeding is under control. We’ll be back on Galileo in—” She turned to meet Greg’s eyes.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “I’ll have a med crew waiting. We’ll look after him, Savosky.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Bear said, and terminated the comm.
Elena cursed, and Arin spoke up. “Listen, Lanie, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to him. It’ll be fine.”
“Sit still,” she said shortly, and Arin fell silent again, his expression closing. Dammit, she’d hurt his feelings again. He did not understand.
How could he? He’s just a kid.
Who you nearly got killed.
She looked up. Herrod was watching her, his black eyes unreadable. She hadn’t seen his face in a year and a half, and he looked older than she remembered. Much older. She did the math in her head: he’d be seventy-nine now. She supposed some years were harsher than others.
Not that he didn’t deserve it.
She glanced behind her to where Bristol and Darrow were sitting with the others. Bristol blanched, his pale skin communicating his feelings without words, and she nearly smiled. She’d always intimidated him. She wasn’t entirely sure why. He was older than she was, and much bigger; but she had to admit he’d annoyed her fairly often, and she’d let him know it. Some people seemed to find her annoyance frightening. When she had been in the Corps, that had been useful.
Rebecca Darrow gave her a friendly nod. “Good to see you, Chief,” she said.
I’m not Chief anymore, Elena thought; but she didn’t correct her. “You too, Becky,” she said. Darrow hadn’t changed: tall, sturdily built, straight jet-black hair, smooth, gold-tan skin without anything resembling a line or blemish. She would look the same at sixty as she did now. After eighteen months away, Elena found the effect unnerving: it would be so easy to tell herself it had all been an illusion, from the transfer to her resignation to this awful day.
Just like Becky Darrow, Greg had not changed. He had stormed in—unasked, as usual—and she had fallen into step with him as if they had never been apart. That had been, she had realized since she left the Corps, one of the foundations of their friendship: they strategized the same way. In the field, in a crisis, their communication was fluid and efficient: no arguments, no power struggles, just solutions. She had always liked working with him, because he made sense. She had been startled as hell the first time she’d learned not everyone felt the same.
She tugged off her hood and smoothed the damp strands of hair out of her eyes. “Can you guys watch him?” she asked Bristol and Darrow. When they nodded, she climbed to her feet and headed for the front of the cabin. This was not the place for their long-overdue conversation, but that wasn’t the only conversation they needed to have.
She slid into the copilot’s seat and looked over at Greg. She wasn’t sure why she had expected him to look different; a year was not so much time. He was still tall, still slim, still square-jawed and flawlessly handsome, still striking with his bright gray and black eyes against his dark skin. Even his hair was the same, cropped so close he was nearly bald. She had asked him, once, why he kept it so short, and he’d said, “Because I like how it feels when I have to slap my head in frustration.” Then he had laughed, and she had never been sure his answer was serious.
She could tell he knew she was looking at him. Years ago, before things had become strange between them, he would have asked her what was wrong. Maybe he doesn’t care anymore, she thought, and was hit by a wave of unexpected loneliness. She had to take a moment to swallow it away.
“Thank you,” she said, “for coming after us.”
“Dumbass place for a cargo shuttle,” he remarked.
“We don’t make the drop, we don’t get paid.”
“In a case like this, maybe it’s a fair trade.” He paused. “Are you guys going to get stiffed on this one?”
“Bear said the import officer told him as long as the cargo was close enough to the cultivation dome for them to retrieve it, he’d sign off.” She sighed. “I don’t know if we’re going to get stiffed. Our accountant will fight that fight. If we don’t get the money, she’ll have to figure out another way to make up the shortfall.”
“So your accountant is a magician.”
Elena thought of Naina, scrupulously honest, dissecting every financial loophole available for the company that employed her. “Yeah, she kind of is. Listen, Greg.” That got his attention. “I want to ask a favor.”
She half expected him to summarily eject her from the shuttle for her nerve, but he just said, “Okay.”
“Do you remember Jamyung, the trader we used to buy parts from?”
He did, and she told him the story, from the comm she had received earlier that day, to arriving in Smolensk to find Jamyung murdered, to Dallas’s story of the strangers who killed him. “But that’s not the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is this … thing he left for me. This artifact. I thought he was bullshitting when he said it talked to him, but it talked to me, too.”
At that he frowned, that familiar formidable scowl, and she knew then he was focused on the problem. “Show me.”
She took the box out of her pocket, and he raised his eyebrows at her. “I should probably have tossed it,” she admitted. “But … there’s something about it. I can’t really explain.”