“No idea.” He reached out a finger, and she held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t do that. That’s when it talked to me, when I touched it.”
His eyes locked with hers. “What did it say?”
“That’s …” She struggled to explain the message. “It was nonsense, really. Overlapping voices, noises, rhythm. And then, emerging from the static, one word. Galileo. Over and over again.”
She hadn’t wanted to tell him, but somehow he had seen it in her face. “It affected you,” he realized, and she nodded.
“It left me feeling … lonely, I guess. And really disoriented. I almost crashed us without the help of those attackers. Greg, if it’s some kind of a weapon …”
“Not much of a weapon if you have to touch it first.”
“Maybe it’s a prototype.”
“That will evolve into a non-contact weapon?” He kept frowning at the artifact, but when he reached out to close the box, she thought he was reluctant. “What’s the favor?”
“I don’t have anything on Budapest sophisticated enough to scan something like that,” she told him. “I was wondering if Ted could look at it. Galileo’s deep scanners would give us soup to nuts on what it’s really doing.”
He nodded. “Of course. I’ll pass it on.” He looked back at her. “You said this came in over your comm? Can you give me a copy of the message?”
That should have been an easy question to answer. She should have sent him over a copy without hesitation. If it had been Greg alone … but she thought of Ted, and the open engineering floor, and all those soldiers, some of whom she didn’t even know, listening to her message. Galileo … Galileo … Galileo …
“Can you promise me,” she asked, “that nobody but you and Ted, and maybe Jessie, will listen to it?”
Anyone else would have demanded an explanation. Anyone else would have told her she was being unreasonable, it was not important, it was just a random impersonal comm. Anyone else would have made her feel foolish for her reticence; after all, this thing was potentially a weapon, and they needed to understand it, no matter how private the message.
But all Greg said was, “You have my word.”
Galileo
Jessica hissed through her teeth when she saw Sparrow enter the landing bay. The little shuttle had taken hits—a few bad ones, too—which meant Greg had been hot-rodding again. He had no business doing that. He should have brought more infantry with him, and a larger arsenal. He should have taken something with armor. He shouldn’t have risked himself in the first place for fifteen thousand tonnes of grain and a freighter shuttle.
Which wasn’t really what he’d done—she knew exactly why he had risked himself—but she was still angry with him.
Greg stuck his head out of the shuttle door and waved Bob’s people in. The medics stepped inside, and Greg climbed out, followed by Bristol, Darrow, and the others, and finally Admiral Herrod. Jessica stood at strict attention and saluted; Greg returned the gesture, but Herrod just gave her an amused look.
“What have we got, Commander?” Greg asked her. Formal. Whether that was for Herrod’s benefit or the infantry’s, she wasn’t sure.
“I’ve had both Oarig and Villipova pissing in my ear since you deployed troops at the wreck, sir,” she told him. It had mostly been Oarig, but she felt obligated to give the two recalcitrant politicians equal responsibility. “They’re accusing each other of destroying the cargo, and they’re both threatening to send troops to the cultivation dome.”
Her captain rubbed his eyes. “The cargo’s not destroyed,” he told her. “How many troops are we talking about, Jess?”
He knew the intelligence as well as she did. “Between standing militias and official security people? About twenty-three hundred in Smolensk, and another fifteen hundred in Baikul.”
“Drop each of those numbers by two hundred fifty,” he told her. “Damn. We don’t have enough people to shut them down by force, unless we’re willing to strike from up here, which would pretty much kill any shot at diplomacy. How far off is Meridia?”
“Eighteen hours.”
“Captain Foster,” Herrod interrupted, “let me jump on this. If they’re mostly still in the threat stage, we may be able to string together some kind of a cease-fire if we agree to help them retrieve the cargo.”
It was not, Jessica thought, an awful idea. Before he’d come aboard Galileo, she’d never have considered Herrod a diplomat, although she recognized that was mostly because he’d never had to be tactful with her. Recently, though, she had decided the role suited him: he read people extremely well, and he seemed to know instinctively when to behave with sympathy, whatever he might really be thinking.
Greg, it seemed, thought the same; he nodded. “Very well. I’ll be in the infirmary with Goldjani. Let me know what you hear from them. And, Admiral—thank you for your help down there.”
That had cost Greg something, but Herrod just arched an eyebrow at him. “I could hardly sit back and do nothing, now could I?” He nodded at Jessica. “Commander Lockwood.” And he left the landing bay.
Jessica gave Greg an inquiring look, and he shrugged. “He held off the attackers,” he told her. “From inside Sparrow, but still. Freed us up to do what needed doing. He was a genuine help.”
Despite her approval of Herrod’s diplomatic abilities, she still knew too much about him to trust his motives. She couldn’t keep the acid out of her voice when she responded. “Could you maybe go on a flight once in your life without getting shot at?”
“They weren’t shooting at us, really,” he told her. “It’s pretty much devolved down there. Budapest was set up from the start.”
Not my point, she thought, but she knew him well enough to let it go. “How’s the kid?”
“Bad.”
Minutes later the med team emerged with a boy on an anti-grav stretcher. His brown skin had alarming undertones of gray, but his eyes, as they swept over the storage bay, were alert and shiny. He met Jessica’s eyes and blinked, then turned away self-consciously. Lucid, then, she thought. It wasn’t a guarantee of anything, but it was not a terrible sign.
After him, dressed in a civilian env suit and covered in dust and something that smelled far worse, came Elena.
Her expression was drawn and anxious, and her appearance was uncharacteristically unkempt. Strands of hair had escaped from a loose braid and were hanging over her face, covered in the same red dust; but through the grime Jessica could see streaks of bright blue interwoven with her natural dark locks. A genetic graft, too; the color went down to the roots, and would grow like that until she changed it. It was a pretty color, Jessica thought, but the fact of it bothered her. Artificial hair color was a nod to civilian conformity. For Elena, it seemed like defeat.
“Is it that bad?”
Jessica realized she had been staring. She met her friend’s eyes, and suddenly none of it mattered, and she flung her arms around Elena, standing on her toes so she could give her tall friend a proper hug. Elena hugged her back. “You look just the same, Jessie,” she said.
Jessica pulled away, aware she was now covered in the same muck Elena was. “You stink,” she said. “And no, the color’s not bad at all. Why blue?”
“It cheers me up,” Elena said. Her smile was wan, and Jessica