And then a sound came over her comm: a digital hiccup, an audio artifact, like a message that had been overly compressed and resent too many times. She caught a few words, then a phrase, and then the message cleared up: “This is an automated distress call from Cytheria, off of the PSI starship Chryse. We are in need of retrieval. Repeating.” The message played over, this time in a common PSI dialect.
“Greg,” she said, “did you just—”
“I received it, too,” he told her. His hand was behind his ear. “Lieutenant Samaras, did you just pick up a distress call?”
“No, sir.” Samaras sounded curious. “We’re clear on comms.”
Greg met Elena’s eyes, then said, “Lieutenant, I need you to raise Chryse for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Elena took a moment to digest that. “Since when,” she asked him, “are you on chatting terms with Chryse?”
“I think that’s overstating it.” When she kept staring, he relented. “Since this morning. But I don’t know that they’ll answer me on an official comm line.”
But a moment later, Greg’s concerns were put to rest. “Captain Foster,” said a warm baritone voice. “What can I do for you?”
“Captain Bayandi,” Greg said, “I’m sorry to trouble you, but we’ve just received a distress call from Commander Ilyana’s shuttle.”
Bayandi. The most elusive PSI captain ever known to Central Gov. And friendly, no less. This was feeling more surreal by the moment.
“Let me check.” Bayandi’s voice had gone serious, but lost none of its warmth, and Elena tried and failed to reconcile his affect with everything she had been taught about the strange, standoffish PSI ship. After a moment, the PSI captain continued. “I am receiving only telemetry, Captain,” he said, palpably worried. “Cytheria has dropped out of the stream. Her environmental systems are intact, but I cannot raise Commander Ilyana. If her shuttle is damaged and she cannot reenter the field—she is not close to anything.”
“Can you get to her?” Greg asked.
There was a brief pause. “Our travel time would be nine hours and four minutes. I do not suppose, Captain Foster, that you have anyone closer?”
“I could go,” Elena put in.
Bayandi said, “May I ask who you are?”
Polite. Not hostile, not reactive; just polite, and faintly curious. “I’m—” How was she supposed to introduce herself? “I’m Elena Shaw,” she said. “I’m off the freighter Budapest.”
But Bayandi knew her name. “Ah, yes—you were chief of engineering on Galileo, weren’t you? It’s a pleasure to meet you. Can your freighter spare you?”
“Yes,” she said firmly, and ignored Greg’s raised eyebrows.
“Then I thank you, Elena Shaw,” Bayandi said, sounding relieved. “We are most grateful for your help. And if you could let me know what you find—if Commander Ilyana is all right—”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I find her,” Elena assured him.
“Please tell her—” He paused again, longer this time. “Please tell her that I hope she is well.”
The comm terminated, and she stood, ready to move. “If I head back to Budapest now,” she reasoned, “I can take the other shuttle before Bear has a chance to stop me.”
“Wait.” He got to his feet, and she stopped. “Elena, I can’t send you on a military rescue.”
“It’s not a military rescue,” she reasoned, “it’s a PSI rescue. And you’re not sending me anywhere. I don’t work for you anymore.”
At that his jaw set, and she was abruptly aware she might have phrased that more tactfully. But when he spoke, he kept his temper. “Okay, then, how about this? It’s irresponsible of you to head off into the unknown in a civilian shuttle. Ilyana’s got weapons. You don’t.”
There was something here she was missing. “Why are you worried about this, Greg?” she asked. “I mean, Chryse is Chryse, sure; but they’re PSI. They’ve never threatened us.”
He stared at her, and she recognized the look in his eyes: Too public. Not here. “We’re stuck here to deal with Yakutsk,” he said, instead of answering her question, “but I can spare you a shuttle. At least you won’t be defenseless.”
He led her out of the infirmary, and she waited him out.
“Captain Taras is worried about Chryse,” he told her as they walked toward the shuttle bay. “Apparently they’ve been acting odd since a comms outage that occurred four months ago.”
“Four months.” The significance of the time frame didn’t escape her. “Taras thinks they’ve been compromised.”
“She didn’t come right out and say that.”
“You think they’ve been compromised.”
“I think it’s not a possibility we can ignore.”
She shook her head. “Bayandi sounds … friendly.”
“He does.” Greg’s tone went dry. “Funny, isn’t it, that the first time we talk to the captain of such an isolated starship, he turns out to be so personable?”
“And the distress call, aimed just at you and me.” She was feeling increasingly uneasy. “I don’t suppose you could spare me a weapon.”
“According to regulations? No.” His lips set in a grim smile. “But under the circumstances, regulations can go fuck themselves.”
The Corps is not here as your personal army, Governor,” Greg told Villipova, “or to teach your people self-defense. We’re here to keep you from blowing each other up.”
Greg was seated at his desk next to Herrod, the two governors on vid before them, and Greg found himself grudgingly grateful for the older man’s presence. Herrod’s habitual emotional detachment worked well in diplomatic situations like this one, when Greg was tempted to abort the entire process and tell everyone involved to grow the hell up. Herrod’s reticence reminded Greg that practical diplomacy was less about making people shake hands than it was about holding people off of each other until frayed tempers managed to settle.
His own frayed temper included.
Villipova frowned. “It’s not possible for you to do that without taking sides,” she insisted. “Oarig’s people shot down that civilian transport. It’s his fault the food both of our cities need lies frozen on the surface.”
“We weren’t shooting down anything!” Oarig interrupted. “They were out there confronting your people, who were going to hoard it all for themselves! They—”
“That’s enough,” Greg snapped. God, this finger-pointing is tedious. “Gov sent us here to keep the two of you from doing this kind of shit to each other,” he told them. “And that means it stops now. You want to hash out who did what to whom—do it afterward, when your people have supplies and safe places to live again. On the other hand”—he felt Herrod’s eyes on him—“if you’re genuinely inclined to shoot down the people trying to help you, we are going to take sides, and it’s not going to be with either one of you. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
Oarig’s lips narrowed. Villipova just looked tired.