“Coincidences do happen.”
“Bullshit, sir.” His eyes blazed, and Greg thought under other circumstances he would like Keita. Instead of rebuking him for the outburst, Greg held the younger man’s gaze steadily, and after a moment Keita shifted and dropped his eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
“Given the day, Commander, I’ll let it go,” Greg said. He avoided looking at Elena. “Why do you think it’s bullshit?”
“Because …” Keita was struggling. “It can’t be coincidence. Not like this. What happened to Exeter … you can’t tell me that was for nothing.”
Keita looked suddenly vulnerable again, and Greg felt exhausted. So many things did happen for nothing, but he did not think this distressed officer could stand to face that just now. He needed to get Keita out so he could unravel this with Elena. “Thank you for your time, Commander,” he said. “You’re dismissed.”
Keita processed the abrupt order, but he did not lose his temper this time. He stood, saluted stiffly, and turned.
“Commander,” Greg called after him. When Keita turned back, he held out the open bottle of scotch. “Take this,” he said. “Share it with your friends.”
Keita gave him a puzzled look, but wrapped his fingers around the bottle and nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and when he left he looked a little less stiff.
Greg sat down again, and ran his hands over his face and into his short-cropped hair. Elena was watching the door where Keita had gone, and he had the distinct impression she was avoiding looking at him. “Smart guy,” he remarked.
“Yes,” she said absently. “He always was.”
“How long were you involved with him?”
She turned back, surprised. At another time he would have laughed at her; she was always startled by how transparent she was. “About three months,” she said warily. “Maybe a little less.”
“Do you trust him?”
At that she sighed and slumped back in the chair, exhaustion washing over her face. “I am not objective about Dee,” she said unwillingly. “Which is to say that yes, I trust him, but I recognize at this point in my life that my instincts about such things are not always particularly accurate.”
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
She nodded. “But whether it’s the whole truth, I don’t know.”
“He may not know the whole truth.”
“Do you ever get tired of all this secret spy bullshit?”
He had grown tired of it the moment he had lost a member of his own crew to it the year before, and a single casualty paled in the face of what had been done to Exeter. “There’s no reason Keita would be involved in this,” he argued aloud. “No reason Çelik would be, either. Or anyone else on Exeter, really. But someone is. The coincidence that your friend doesn’t want to see is not that it all happened now, but that it all happened at once. And maybe that Orunmila was close enough to defend. I’m not convinced there would have been much left of Exeter if they’d had to wait until we got there.”
“I don’t like PSI being pulled into this. Too many admirals in Shadow Ops are ready to use them as a catalyst for war.”
“Not going to do much good when they’re throwing their ships bodily between ours and the enemy, and shifting broken bulkheads to rescue our injured officers.”
“It’s awfully risky for them, though, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Who? PSI?”
“Shadow Ops. Assuming they’re the ones behind this. Exeter’s a well-known ship. To finance an attack … of course other ships were going to show up to help her. They couldn’t possibly have been confident of a victory.”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but they got one, didn’t they?”
“I’m just thinking it might be a coincidence after all.”
He shook his head. “With what Jessica found in their weapons systems?”
“I know.” Exhausted again. “I just—I’m not Dee, Greg. I want it to be an accident. Bad timing. A rogue Syndicate tribe, a random equipment failure, them grabbing a prisoner just for the hell of it. I know there has to be more to it, but God, it’s awful enough without adding conspiracies on top of it.”
The final list had been ninety-seven people. A full quarter of Exeter’s crew. Greg had sent the list back to Central, and had offered to help notify the families. Ordinarily, that would be Çelik’s job, but Greg wouldn’t hazard a guess as to when the man would be up to it. He was not sure he himself could be up to such a job, were it his own crew.
He agreed with Elena. He wanted Keita to be wrong as well. He wanted this tragedy to be one rogue, stupid Syndicate tribe, and nothing more. He wanted to take the revenge the Corps would demand, to pursue and destroy the tribe that did all of this, and ignore the tendrils that reached out into secret areas of his own government, areas half his own chain of command didn’t know existed.
There were so few of them who knew the whole story, and only one person who had been through it all with him. And he needed her thinking clearly, instead of dwelling on the horror.
Which is more than I have the right to ask of anyone.
“We need more information before we draw conclusions,” he reminded her. They were missing too many pieces. He had no doubt someone had gone after MacBride, but he couldn’t yet understand why.
Elena’s shoulders straightened, just a little, and some of the tension left her. “When will we hear from that tracker?” she asked.
He rubbed his eyes again. “Captain Shiang thinks somewhere in the next five hours or so.”
“You talked to her.”
“After a fashion. She commed me earlier to tell me to fuck off.”
Elena’s eyebrows shot up, and to his amazement she looked faintly amused. “You personally?”
“Kind of, yeah.” He related the conversation, such as it was. “And you know, Elena? I hadn’t thought of how it must look to her. One minute I’m playing the friendly representative of the Big Bad Admiralty, explaining to her that no, really, there’s no special reason we’ve deployed an extra warship in the area, and the next someone’s actually blowing the hell out of a ship she’s worked with.”
“It matters to her, doesn’t it? Exeter.”
“I think if Central really cared about getting Shiang on their good side, they’d have had Çelik talk to her years ago.”
She was silent a moment. “Greg, why didn’t anyone tell us about MacBride? Why was the transport classified in the first place?”
It was a good question. “Your friend Jimmy Youda was a pretty weak link,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but be fair: he wasn’t in on it at first. And Jimmy gets spiky when he’s upset. I don’t think he’d be a security risk under ordinary circumstances.”
And that thought bothered Greg. In the last several decades, Central had been fortunate: Corps deployments were often relatively uneventful, the kinds of troubles they ran into small, familiar, and manageable. But no Corps soldier should allow themselves to forget that extraordinary circumstances happened. He wanted suddenly to talk to Çelik about Exeter’s crew, and whom Çelik himself trusted. Greg shook his head. “This whole business stinks. I don’t even know if I should comm back for orders. If it was Shadow Ops that grabbed MacBride, anything the Admiralty might tell us right now is probably bullshit.”
“Greg,”