Ted was apparently accustomed to her random changes of subject. “Given how bad he is at staying out of trouble, you may have a problem.”
“That was only once.”
“And you had to save his ass. And then he promoted you.”
“He’s a bastard.”
“You’re the one who works with him all day; you’d know better than I would.” He made a sound. “That’s it, Jess. Weapons systems. Get me everything you can preserve, as dense as you can get it.”
She spent the next half hour sorting through the magnetic shadows and memory imprints of the blocks Ted specified. She did not even have to lay it all out sequentially to see the pattern: the excision of information, the lobotomizing of the weapons systems’ connection to the ship’s larger mind. And at the end of it, fragments of something else: a personal bio key, obscuring a shattered block of indecipherable commands Exeter had not survived to execute.
This was careful damage, done with thought, entirely different from the randomized destruction of heat and pulse waves. And it had been done much earlier.
“What do you think, Ted?” she asked. “Sixteen hours?”
“No more than seventeen, for sure,” he replied. “Didn’t their flight plan have them in the field seventeen hours ago?”
Despite its size, Exeter’s massive stellar batteries ensured it could travel for long stretches in the field. Elena had told her once, but Jessica could not remember. “What’s she rated for?” she asked Ted.
“Nineteen hours, but she’s done twenty-one without turning a hair,” he recalled. “Shit, Jess.”
Ted was not one to curse, but this time she was not surprised. The implication was clear to her as well. “Had to be someone on board.”
“What about a delayed payload? Could someone have coded something like this?”
She frowned at the system. “Possibly,” she allowed. “I’ll have to take a closer look. But I don’t think so, Ted. The timing would have had to be just right, or someone would have discovered it as part of a maintenance run or a drill. You don’t just hack a payload into a Central starship. It’d be hard even for me.”
He was quiet for a moment. “But someone did. And people died, Jess. Someone did this, and did it on purpose. Someone they knew.”
She thought back over her career, over her schooling, over her early life on a planet where fully half of the children she knew had died before the age of fourteen. “Knowing someone,” she told him, “doesn’t mean they won’t fuck you over.”
Greg asked the same question Ted had. “How much skill would it take to seed something like this to execute later?”
She was leaning against the wall, eyes closed, head aching from staring at small pieces of data for hours. Emily had brought the emergency lights online, and they had given Jessica some energy, but they could not erase eye strain. “Given enough prep time,” she said, “I might be able to code something, although I don’t think I’d bet my life—let alone my career—on the thing working. The Admiralty might have someone, though.” She thought of Shadow Ops, but did not bother reminding him of the skillsets present in that organization.
He knew more of those details than she did.
“How hard would it be for someone to do it in person?”
“Not hard. They’d need command codes and a little knowledge of weapons systems, but that’s it.”
He paused, and she imagined him rubbing his eyes. He is going to be very nearsighted someday. “Have you got enough left to find out whose command code was used?”
At last, an easy answer—but not one she wanted to give him. “No, sir. All the analytical memory is gone. Volatile storage doesn’t even have echoes left. I found a partial bio key that was probably intended to wipe the evidence after the fact, but there’s not enough to attempt a match.” She fought a wave of depression. “We can’t find out, sir. The information is just not there.”
Another pause, then: “Okay.” He had regrouped, just in those few seconds. “I want you back on Galileo. Get in touch with the Admiralty—Herrod, if you can get him, but otherwise anyone but Waris—and get this area quarantined. We’ll need another ship for the wounded, but I want it clear this is a crime scene. Get him to agree to that.”
“You think he will?”
“If he doesn’t,” Greg said grimly, “that tells us something right there. After you’ve talked to him, get a crew over here to finish the core analysis.”
She felt a bubble of indignation. “Sir—” she began.
“Jessica.” His voice was gentle, the way it got when he was about to tell her she was an idiot. “Is this job so delicate that you’re the only one who can do it?”
“Are you telling me I’m replaceable?”
“I’m telling you you’re the second-in-command, and you need to delegate, because you’re not at all replaceable and right now I need you. Pick some people you trust, and get them on the job.”
“I don’t trust anyone.” That wasn’t precisely true. Emily had some damn good crypto people. None as good as Jessica was, but hadn’t she just been thinking that what this job needed most was patience? “It feels wrong, sir,” she confessed, “passing this off on someone else.”
“I know.” And that, of course, was the worst part: he did. “But right now that’s your duty, Commander. We have good people. Trust them to do their jobs.”
Within a few minutes, she was able to find a space on a shuttle back to Galileo, and she sat in silence next to a half dozen of Exeter’s crew, all with minor abrasions, all somber and still. None of them seemed inclined to look at her, and she felt that strange indignation again. Who am I to be heading home, to my bright room and my well-lit corridors and all the people I love? Why do I deserve that peace, when these people have lost everything in the space of a few minutes? Because they had to know they would never be going back to Exeter. She wondered if they would have the chance to retrieve their possessions, and she resolved, if she had the power, to make sure they were given the time.
She wanted to talk to Elena. Elena always let her rant, and never tried to slow her down or tell her she was being silly. Elena was one of a very few people who had ever seen her cry. But Elena would be handling her own raft of shit right now—or, rather, avoiding it. She was just like Greg that way: she went stony, handling what was in front of her, all emotion shoved aside. But unlike Greg, the emotion eventually caught up with her, and she would flame out in a burst of grief and rage, days, sometimes weeks later.
Greg swallowed everything. Elena held on until she flew apart. As much as Jessica admired them both, neither was teaching a lesson she wanted to learn.
Galileo
Nearly seven hours later, Elena finally flew home.
It had occurred to her, during the fifth hour she was floating outside going over the burned-out remains of Exeter’s decking, that she ought to pass the task off to someone else. Someone uninvolved, who had not been awake for twenty-five hours. But there was something in her that wanted the worst of it laid out starkly before her, so she could get on with the anger and grief and move beyond it. She hoped if she stared point-blank at the horror long enough, she could jolt her way past the leaden numbness