He set aside, for a moment, the potentially troublesome thought that Chryse wouldn’t see Galileo as a threat. “So you’d like me to ask them if they need help, and let them know you’re concerned, and maybe see if I can get them to contact you with more details?”
“It sounds like I’m asking you to mediate a family squabble, doesn’t it, Captain?”
He did not believe Taras would involve him in something she thought was that petty. “I’m happy to be helpful, if I can, Captain Taras. I’ll let you know what Chryse says.”
“Thank you, Captain Foster.” And she sounded as relieved as he had ever heard her.
Later, Greg stood under the shower, organizing his thoughts, letting the water pummel the muscles in his neck. He couldn’t avoid putting the conversation into his official report; her comm would be on record already, and his command chain would want to know what she had said. But because it was neither dangerous nor related to Galileo’s current mission, he was not obligated to contact the Admiralty immediately. Regardless of his diminished influence, one thing about the Admiralty remained consistent: it paid to stay free of the sticky tendrils of Corps bureaucracy as long as possible. If the entire issue came down to nothing but a single conversation with a PSI ship, they wouldn’t be interested anyway.
Even though it’s Chryse?
Chryse, he had to admit, was different. Chryse was enigmatic on an unprecedented level. Many Corps ships had interacted with Chryse’s officers, but information exchanges were almost nonexistent. Greg had believed on some level it was because Meridia was so uncharacteristically open, and Chryse was going for balance. But the Corps abhorred opacity in anyone but themselves, and in PSI specifically. Even the most benign information on Chryse would be treated as important intel.
He rinsed off rapidly. “Galileo, how far are we from Yakutsk?”
“Three hours.”
He frowned. “How long was I running?”
“Two hours, four minutes.”
No wonder I ache. He shut off the water and reached for his clothes.
His friends often accused him of running to escape, to avoid the difficult things in his life; but in reality he couldn’t remember a time in his life when he didn’t run. His earliest memories were of sunrises by the beach, running along the ocean with his mother, his feet getting bogged down in the wet sand. She, with her longer legs, would run ahead, and then loop around to catch him from behind, sometimes sweeping him off his feet, sometimes diving into the ocean and holding out her arms, daring him to jump in after her.
But he didn’t, not often. Greg didn’t like to swim. Greg liked to run. And as often as he ran to stop thinking, he ran to ruminate, to have a space where he could turn everything over in his head when nobody would interrupt him or ask him to make a decision. Running allowed him to be alone, and these days, the moments in which he was alone were the only ones when he did not feel loneliness.
He wondered, now and then, if he should not be so used to loneliness.
He had just discarded his towel after one final pass over his short-cropped black hair when footsteps intruded on his thoughts. He looked up to find Gov’s assigned diplomat: Admiral Josiah Herrod, retired, who nodded when Greg caught his eye. “Good evening, Captain.”
“Good evening, Admiral.” Herrod, despite his nearly eighty years, was barrel-chested, sturdy, and imposing—and, Greg reflected, possibly the only person on board Galileo lonelier than Greg was himself. That was not because nobody knew Herrod, of course. It was because they knew him quite well—and thoroughly disliked him.
But nobody disliked him as thoroughly as Greg.
“Did it help?” Herrod asked him. “The running?”
Greg had, at first, assumed that Herrod’s assignment to the mission on Yakutsk was a thinly veiled threat. Before his retirement, Herrod had not only been highly placed within the Admiralty, but had been part of the Admiralty’s unofficial intelligence unit, Shadow Ops. Greg had learned years ago that Shadow Ops sometimes utilized methods that Greg—and, he hoped, most people with any soul at all—found reprehensible. He had never been clear as to whether or not Herrod condoned all of their methods, and the admiral had indeed helped Galileo from time to time; but he had also been part of the committee that had taken Greg’s chief of engineering from him, and Greg was disinclined to forgive.
But he had learned over the weeks that the man had some diplomatic skill, and Greg had grudgingly concluded that there was a good possibility he had been assigned because he was the best person for the job. In fact, he had more than once wondered why Herrod had not been sent to the Fifth Sector, where Central’s relationship with the wealthy Olam Colony was becoming increasingly strained. But Herrod’s combination of tact and bluntness had been keeping Yakutsk’s governors at the table longer than Greg would have thought possible. And for the sake of the mission, Greg could be satisfied with the knowledge that Herrod knew exactly why—and how much—Greg blamed him for everything that had happened over the last eighteen months.
“It did, thank you,” Greg lied.
Herrod pulled off his jacket and hung it on the wall. It was black, like an Admiralty uniform, but unadorned with piping of any kind. On Herrod, any jacket would look like a uniform. “Used to run,” the old man offered. “Found it inefficient. Too much time in my own head.” He cocked an eye at Greg. “Suppose that’s why you like it.”
“Suppose so.” Greg shifted; he was no good at small talk, even with people he liked. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”
Herrod’s dark eyes grew amused. “I’m not an officer anymore,” he pointed out. “Your time is your own.” But he relented with a nod. “I’ll see you in a few hours, Captain Foster.”
Greg headed for his office, annoyed, feeling he had been bested in a way he did not understand.
Yakutsk
In the years when Galileo patrolled the Fourth Sector, Elena had been on Yakutsk more than two dozen times. Baikul, the dome facing the luminous green gas giant Lena, attracted some light tourism—she suspected the doomed terraformer project had been their idea—but she had spent all her time in Smolensk, the dome facing the stars. Smolensk was serviceable and unadorned, without hotels or restaurants oriented to off-worlders, but Elena had always enjoyed it. There was an efficiency to the place and its people, a cheerful fuck you aimed at anyone who expected any non-transactional deference. Elena had received no respect for her Corps contacts, but her knowledge of machinery and her straightforward negotiation for the parts she needed had made her solid professional allies, if not friends.
She had seen some vid of the moon’s temporarily terraformed surface. It had been beautiful: heavy on low-growing flowers and rudimentary crops, with habitats built by the wary colonists slowly beginning to spread. The atmosphere, produced by the terraformers and secured by an artificial gravity field designed to keep the solar winds from sweeping it out to space, had turned the sky a lilac-tinged blue, touched here and there with carefully regulated rain clouds. It had the look of a beginning, a seedling, the start of something that might someday become more substantial. Early days on many planets were beautiful and full of promise, but Elena had seen enough terraformed worlds to have a sense of Yakutsk’s fragility.
When the terraformers had failed, she had spoken with Jessica. They both agreed it was most likely Ellis Systems behind the catastrophe. But in truth, she would not