An unfamiliar voice came over Elena’s comm. “Galileo, this is Orunmila.” The woman’s voice was warm and melodic, her accent subtle, all soft consonants and low vowels. “We fired a tracker. Our apologies for alarming you.”
Suddenly Elena could breathe again. “Our apologies for doubting you,” she replied. “And thank you.”
“And you, Galileo.” The connection dropped, and it was only in the silence that Elena wondered if that musical-voiced woman had been Greg’s irritable Captain Shiang.
Elena flew Greg, Jessica, and three computational experts in a shuttle designed to carry four. Ordinarily Jessica would have made an acidic joke about the close quarters, but Elena’s usually irrepressible friend was silent, her normally sharp green eyes watching absently out the window as they approached Exeter’s carcass.
Which is what it is, Elena kept telling herself. Despite the oxygen and gravity still intact in pockets. Despite the fires still sputtering out from the shattered systems that still had a power source. A full third of the ship’s structure was gone; the rest of her could have been in perfect shape, and Central still would not have elected to repair her. Exeter was fifteen years old, near the end of her expected life span; but even a newer ship would have been decommissioned and listed as scrap. Despite their reliance on technology and science, the Corps was not without its institutionalized superstitions, and nobody would ever knowingly serve on a ship that had lost a battle like this one. Exeter, just that morning humming and perfect and home to four hundred people, was as dead as if there were nothing left of her at all.
Elena had been bitterly unhappy during her deployment on Exeter. Her escape to Galileo had felt like fleeing a prison. But she had friends who had stayed behind, had thrived, had loved the place as their home, just as she loved Galileo.
She fixed her eyes on the schematic of Exeter that the shuttle had superimposed over the front window, looking for an open docking conduit. She avoided the urge to look over at Greg. She knew he was worried about her, but he would never say anything in front of the others. He knew all about her experiences on Exeter—well, almost all—and he understood the curious attachment that came with one’s first deployment. He would know she was upset, too, know she wanted to run through the ship and find out how many of her friends had died. He would also know she would not indulge the wish, that she would do her duty to the best of her ability. And he would count on her to tell him if she couldn’t cope, even knowing what the admission would mean to her.
She was recognizing more and more often lately how well he knew her, despite all the ways he did not know her at all. A year ago, before she had learned she knew nothing of him at all, the thought would have been comforting.
Greg commed Commander Broadmoor shortly before they docked. “Where are we?” he said.
“We’ve got thirty-seven survivors so far,” the security chief told him. “No raiders yet. There are dead spaces between us and Control that we’ll need to physically bridge. And the core is silent, which means we’re stuck on external comms. The faster we can get past that, the easier it’ll be to sweep the ship. Do you have Lock—uh, Commander Lockwood with you? We could use her expertise.”
Up until seven months ago, Jessica had reported to Emily Broadmoor, and the security chief still sometimes forgot to address her with her new rank. Elena had been worried, in the beginning, that Emily would resent Jessica’s being promoted over her, but as it turned out Commander Broadmoor was pleased. “Amazing hacker,” she had confided to Elena, “but as a subordinate? What a pain in the ass.”
Elena docked the shuttle, and one by one they lowered themselves into what remained of the CCSS Exeter. The corridor was dark apart from the dim light coming from the shuttle, and she pulled a loop of emergency lights from her toolkit, pressing the glowing blue strip to the wall. Here the corridor was untouched, the wall and floors undamaged, the only evidence of injury the stillness and the dark. She could hear the hiss of the environmentals, but none of the mechanical hum of the engines. Which made sense, she realized belatedly: the engines were gone. The environmentals were likely running on batteries, and she struggled to remember how big a bank Exeter carried. “The systems won’t last more than twelve hours,” she told Greg, doing the math in her head. “We need to pull some emergency packs over from Galileo.”
He commed back to their ship as Emily came around the corner, a dozen infantry flanking her. She gave them a crisp salute, and turned immediately to Jessica. “Think you can get us talking, Commander?” she asked.
Elena and Greg left the technical people to their work and moved to the infantry. These were combat soldiers: broad, well-muscled, and well-armed, and Elena hoped they would be superfluous. Greg picked off half of them and put them under Elena’s command. “I need you to get down to engineering,” he told them, “or what’s left of it. Chief, see what you can find there, if there’s anything we can postmortem. And I want to know what that limpet left behind at the entry point. The quicker we can identify the tribe, the quicker we can shut the bastards down.” He met her eyes then, for the first time since they had been sitting in his office idly writing reports. Ten minutes ago? Five? “You stay on the line, Chief. Understand?” He didn’t wait for her answer, but turned to frown at the infantry. “All of you. Thirty seconds goes by without someone telling me what’s going on, I’m assuming an emergency situation and we go after you, weapons hot.”
Nods all around. Elena stepped into the group, feeling oddly slight despite being taller than four of them. She knew what worried Greg: Exeter had almost certainly been boarded. And without knowing why the raiders had come, they had to assume something—or someone—had been left behind.
Exeter
Guanyin had never been on a Central ship before. Captain Çelik had offered once, when she was just twenty-one and in the early stages of her training with Chanyu. She had desperately wanted to go, but Chanyu had politely vetoed the idea, and Çelik had not asked again. Now, wandering Exeter’s dark, unfamiliar corridors, she wished she had pushed the point, had seen what this lifeless, colorless structure had looked like when it was functional. She might have been able to lead the mission without feeling like she was walking through a tomb.
She had eight of her security people with her, including Cali, who was following a resentful three steps behind. Cali had expended a fair amount of energy trying to convince Guanyin to stay behind, beginning with stating her value as the ship’s captain, and eventually resorting to referring to her pregnancy. But that was not what had made Guanyin shut her down. When the appeal to Guanyin’s maternal instincts had failed, Cali had gone for politics.
“You step on a Corps starship, you’re sending a message,” she had said, in front of the assembled landing team. “You’re implying alliance. Commitment. Never mind Captain Çelik—have you thought about what their command chain is going to think?”
This, she thought, is why you will never be anyone’s first officer, Cali. But even as the rational thought was running through her head, she lost her temper completely. “Who are you to tell me I should leave them to their own devices?” she had snapped. Aida’s head had come up when she said it, and she realized he had never really seen her temper before. A learning experience for him, then. “They are in trouble, and like any other ship in trouble we will help them. And we, Lieutenant, means me.”
Cali had backed down. She had, in fact, said nothing at all to Guanyin since then. Guanyin wanted to shake her for her silliness. Protectiveness was one thing, but Guanyin was the ship’s captain. If Cali had a problem with an order, the place to bring it up was not in front of the whole crew.
She had spoken briefly to Captain Foster before they