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CHAPTER 2
Galileo

Took on parts at Lakota, Greg Foster wrote. Four days’ travel en route to Shixin. Fucked up the latest negotiations with PSI.

No. It was not the sort of report he would be allowed to file.

He swept a finger through the offending paragraph to delete it and stared, frustrated, at the nearly empty document. Realistically, writing the report should have taken no more than half an hour—less if he wrote in generalities—but he was fairly certain insufficient detail would cause Admiral Herrod to bounce the report right back with orders to do it over. Even with a proper level of information, though, he would need to take some care with his word choice. Allowing his frustration to bleed through onto the page would not help his shaky standing with the Admiralty.

Looking back on his conversation with the PSI captain, he couldn’t blame her for being suspicious. Galileo was hardly a stealth ship—even before the blowup last year, Greg’s ship and her crew had kept a fairly high profile in the squabble-ridden Fourth Sector. And their first foray into the Fifth Sector had involved a set of incidents that had almost provoked all-out war between Central and the PSI ships in that region. He had known Galileo’s precipitous deployment to the Third Sector, done without so much as a polite forewarning for the non-Corps ships in the area, was likely to be misinterpreted. What he hadn’t quite understood was how little his experiences in the Fifth Sector would matter here.

Shiang Guanyin, captain of the PSI ship Orunmila, had viewed Galileo’s arrival with hair-trigger paranoia, and he could not blame her. But even so, he had been surprised to find himself so far unable to open any kind of dialogue with her at all.

“Thank you for the introduction,” she had said, her Standard enunciated carefully. “Should we find ourselves requiring anything at all from you or your government, we will let you know.” And she had terminated the comm.

He did not have to review his diplomatic training to recognize she felt insulted, and by more than Galileo’s presence. Clearly something in how he had presented himself had put her off.

He had considered more than once just telling her the truth: that Galileo’s presence had nothing to do with PSI, or even the resource issues in the Third Sector. Central was indeed spread too thin, the supply chains delivering raw materials for construction having been constrained for years; but Galileo had been reassigned for an entirely different reason. He could tell Captain Shiang, he supposed, that he was only there so his superiors could make sure he remembered who called the shots. But he did not think that would inspire confidence in either him or Central Gov.

Although it would certainly torpedo what’s left of my career.

Weary of his mind running in circles, he rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger and let his attention drift to the window. There were no stars for him to contemplate, just the silver-blue brightness of the FTL field moderated by Galileo’s polarizers. They would be in the field another three hours before they stopped to recharge, and another five days before finally reaching their supply pickup. If he finished this damn report, he could enjoy some peace and quiet for a change. The last six months had been, in some ways, the most eventful of his fourteen-year career.

There was the court-martial and its outcome, of course, about which he was still not sure what to think. What had happened the year before had been too public for the Admiralty to cover up, and they had struggled to come up with charges that reflected the seriousness of the events but didn’t alienate a public that seemed inclined to see both Greg and Elena as heroes. In the end they were charged with insubordination and destruction of government property, although the public record of the trial was coy about exactly what that property had been.

The final verdict—splitting hairs over specific charges, making them appear to be something between naively innocent and subversively guilty—had turned out to be strangely toothless. He and Elena had been taken off the promotion lists—her for a year, him for two—and they had each been assigned their own personal admiral with whom they were required to file monthly mission reports for the next half year. The most concrete changes were Galileo’s reassignment from her usual Fourth Sector patrol to the Third Sector, and the deployment of a dozen recent Academy graduates who probably shouldn’t have made it past their first year.

Which meant that, yes, they had been sent a message. Just not one that made sense to Greg. Anyone who thought subtle insults would alter either his or her conviction that they had done exactly the right thing was unfamiliar with both of them to the point of absurdity.

But it was more than his professional life that had changed. For the first time in thirteen years—since he had deployed at the arrogant, self-assured age of twenty-four—he was unmarried and unattached, and he had not considered the impact that would have on his day-to-day life. There had always been people who saw his marriage as a challenge rather than a deterrent, but its absence had brought him a whole new population of admirers that he had no idea how to properly deflect. His usual techniques were not as effective on this crowd, and he often found himself caught flat-footed while trying to let someone down kindly. Having a wife had provided a buffer between him and the natural impulses of a crew that spent months in close quarters. He had been working to include himself more in their day-to-day lives, and many of them seemed happy to welcome him in without limits.

Jessica Lockwood, his newly minted second-in-command, had tried to explain it to him. “They’re just happy for you, sir,” she had told him, as if that explained everything. Jessica always put him in mind of his sister: practical and irrepressible, indulgent with what she perceived to be his shortcomings. Jessica would never come right out and tell him he was an emotional idiot, but he was pretty sure she thought it frequently.

And then there were the people who expressed sympathy about his divorce—which he found equally puzzling. He did not doubt their intentions, but he did not understand how they could so thoroughly misread how he felt. Even Jessica tiptoed around the subject of Caroline, as if his ex-wife were a land mine or a raw nerve. In truth, he almost never thought of her, all the pain and resentment of their fourteen-year marriage having vanished for him even before the dissolution was finalized. Most days he felt light, more buoyant than he had felt since he was a child, and nobody seemed to notice.

Well, almost nobody.

Resigning himself to the impulse, he engaged his comm in text mode. “You up?” he asked.

A brief pause, and the word Yes appeared in the air half a meter before his eyes.

“You done yet?”

No.

He shouldn’t ask. He had no business asking. Things between them had not yet healed. “You want to come finish here?”

A longer pause this time. Then: Do you have tea?

“I will by the time you get here.”

She rang the door chime when she arrived. This was a regression—for years she had walked into his office unannounced, confident of her welcome. But showing up at all … that was progress. Glacial and frustrating, but progress.

He had Galileo open the door, and his chief of engineering walked in. Elena Shaw, his closest friend before he had blown it all up, still the person he trusted above anyone else. He had thought, for years, that what he felt for her was complicated, designed to trip him up when he least expected it. For a time, he had thought her presence was a curse. It was only recently, when faced with losing her, that he had recognized what he felt for her was simple. What was complicated was coping with it.

Oblivious to his ruminating, she dropped into the chair across from him and wrapped her fingers around the mug of hot tea. “So how far did you get?” she asked.

She was watching him with those eyes of hers, sharp and perceptive and bright with intelligence. Also dark and beautiful and so easy to get lost in. She was not pretty the way many of the women on his ship were pretty: her features were too uneven, the balance thrown off by her huge eyes and substantial nose. But there was an elegance about her, the way she moved, the way she spoke, as if she were some creature of earth and fire, liquid and molten. He often thought he could spend the rest of his days quite happily doing nothing but watching her.

In fact, he had said this to his father when he had visited last month. The older man had shaken his head, and said it was a damn good thing Greg had gotten divorced.

More proof he knows me better than I thought he did.

“Through last week,” he replied to Elena’s question.

She rolled her eyes, leaning back and lifting the mug close to her face. “I’m three weeks behind,” she confessed. “I have too much work to do for this shit.”

“It’s not about the report. It’s about reminding us who’s the boss.”

She knew that, of course. They had discussed the outcome at the time, and both understood the court-martial could have ended quite differently. The Admiralty would have been well within its rights to throw them out of the service entirely—saving the sector be damned. They hadn’t, and the one conclusion he and Elena had come up with was that the Admiralty simply couldn’t agree on what to do with them. “Some of them wanted to give you a medal,” Admiral Herrod had told Greg shortly after the trial’s conclusion. “Some of them wanted to separate the two of you.” At that the old man had frowned, and for a moment Greg had the impression that the typically circumspect admiral was speaking entirely off the record. “Whatever else you do, Foster—don’t let them separate you. And watch your back.”

It was a precaution Greg had already thought about, but hearing Herrod suggest it, when he couldn’t be sure where the man’s loyalties lay, left Greg feeling even more uncertain and unsafe.

When he had repeated Herrod’s words to Elena, she had only said, “Where does he think we would go?”

She was watching him now through the steam from her tea. “You should have Jessie do it for you,” she told him.

“She doesn’t write like me.”

“You think Herrod gives a damn?”

“Why don’t you ask her to do yours?”

She gave him a mock glare. “You promoted her over me, remember?”

“Okay, then get Galileo to do it.”

“Which is not a terrible idea,” she agreed, “apart from the fact that Galileo wouldn’t write like me at all.”

“So we can’t get around this,” he concluded, resigned.

She set the mug down on the desk. “Thirty minutes, no talking, we knock these out and we’re done with it.”

“And promise ourselves not to leave it to the last minute next month.”

She grinned. “That too.”

They both fell silent, and Greg returned to figuring out how to describe his discussions with PSI. He wrote and erased the section of his report four times, aware he was attracting Elena’s attention. At last he leaned back, frustrated. “I don’t know how to say this,” he said.

“What have you got?”

“I just deleted it.” At her look, he added, “I can’t just tell him ‘I said this, and she said that.’ I know Herrod. He’s not going to give me any leeway, not in an official document. The man doesn’t like me.”

“It’s not personal. The man is doing a job, just like you are.” When he said nothing, she extended a hand toward his document. “Let me try.”

“You don’t write like me, either.”

“So wordsmith it when I’m done.”

He let her tug the document to her side of the desk, watching her set her own aside. She read his last paragraph and frowned, then wrote rapidly for a moment. When she was finished, she pushed the document back over to him.

He read. “This is a lie.”

“It is not.”

“Negotiations are not ‘ongoing.’ I’m trying to figure out how I could possibly respond to her without sounding like an asshole.”

“The most important thing about diplomacy,” Elena said, “is not the goal. It’s establishing communication. You’ve done that.” He glared, and she shook her head. “How can you be such a good diplomat, and so lousy at managing your own chain of command?”

“I’m not a good diplomat. That’s the problem.” But he reread her words. They were not bad. He reached in and reordered a phrase—she had nailed his voice pretty well. If you use this, he reminded himself, you can be finished. “Herrod will peg this for bullshit.”

“Of course he will.” She had turned back to her own work. “He’s a bright person. But you’ll have made the effort to spin it, and that’s what he wants.” She made a few notes, then sat back. “There.”

“You wrote up three weeks already?”

She shrugged. “I’m a mechanic. My life is much less interesting than yours.”

“Plus Admiral Waris likes you.”

Elena’s supervisor, Ilona Waris, had been a mechanics teacher when Elena was at Central’s military academy on Earth, and Elena’s aptitude had rapidly secured her place as the teacher’s favorite. Waris had kept track of Elena’s career, occasionally offering unsolicited advice, but Greg had always had the sense that Elena found the woman overbearing. Elena had no ambition—she would not even have been chief if Galileo’s old chief hadn’t been killed—but she had enough political savvy to keep from completely rebuffing Waris’s sporadic attempts to keep in touch.

Elena had paused, and was looking at him, her expression troubled. “She voted to acquit us,” she said.

“Is that bad?”

“She said … how did she put it? ‘Your careers shouldn’t be hamstrung over one bad call in the field.’ ”

Bad call. He could tell from her expression she disagreed with the term as much as he did. “You think she’s on the other side?”

The other side meant Shadow Ops, an organization within Central’s official government that wielded far more power than most people knew. S-O had been knee-deep in the events that had ended with their trial. Not that they could prove any of it, of course. All of the physical evidence was gone, and S-O’s public face was one of benign, largely ineffective bureaucracy. But they both knew differently, and he knew she was aware of the implications of Admiral Waris’s statement. Acquittal would have meant Central could have sent them off anywhere, unsupervised. They could have been separated, isolated from each other, alone with their suspicions and without resources to pursue them. Or they could have vanished without a trace, just a couple of random, unrelated accidents, and no one would even have asked the question.

“I think,” Elena told him, “that presuming on an old acquaintance would be incalculably foolish. So I will be a boring mechanic in my reports, and she can check off a box, and she and I can smile at each other with our fingers crossed behind our backs.”

Trust was the biggest casualty of the events of the last year. Elena, despite her years of experience in the Corps, used to trust her superiors to be in the right, at least as far as their intentions were concerned. The loss was a small one, he suspected, but it was a loss all the same, on the heels of far too many others. “Elena,” he began, “you know I—”

A high tone sounded, and the wall readout flashed red. He stood, but across from him Elena was already moving, sweeping away both of their documents with a wave of her hand and pulling up a tactical view of Galileo. Out the window the field dimmed and dissipated into stars, and they hung still for a moment as the ship changed their flight plan. Then the stars blurred and they were in the field again, and if he had not heard the alarm he would have thought nothing had changed.

A priority Central distress call.

All ships in the vicinity, help us.

“Status,” he said tersely. Above his desk, his ship rendered a reconstructed tactical display of a starship similar in design to Galileo, only three times the size: a great sprawling eagle rather than a sparrow. The CCSS Exeter. He stole a glance at Elena, who was staring at the display, her jaw set. In addition to being the Corps ship that had patrolled the Third Sector the longest, Exeter had been Elena’s first deployment. She still knew people who served there.

Emily Broadmoor, Greg’s chief of security and infantry commander, entered the room as Galileo gave status. “CCSS Exeter reports being under attack by twenty-seven Syndicate raiders. Current readings count twenty.”

Twenty-seven. He could not recall ever hearing of a Syndicate tribe so large.

“Additional status is available,” Galileo added helpfully.

Jessica came in, trailed by Greg’s medical and comms officers. He caught her eye. “Give us what you’ve got,” he told his ship, as Jessica moved to stand beside him.

The display animated with twenty-seven small ships, replaying the status relayed by Exeter’s sensors. The small ships spiraled in eerie unison, blasting somewhat futilely at Exeter’s solid hull. Exeter was firing back with external weapons, but her response was sluggish, and the raiders looped and dashed and avoided more shots than they took. As they all watched, one raider split from the others, heading abruptly toward Exeter’s belly. Exeter shot at the small fighter, a single gun, over and over again. She missed each time.

The little ship pitched and yawed like a drunken soldier, and for a moment Greg hoped against hope that it would miss Exeter entirely. But as they watched, it sped up and lurched into Exeter’s side.

Greg’s office was lit by the playback of the massive blast, and when it faded there was a flaming crescent carved out of Exeter’s side, debris flying out of the gap. One-third of the starship had vanished. That the ship had survived to send a distress call was a minor miracle.

Greg’s fists clenched involuntarily as they watched the remainder of the reenactment. He knew it was already over, but he found himself waiting for the battle to go differently, for their gunner’s aim to improve, for some impossible sign that Exeter would recover. Instead, a single raider flew, unmolested, into Exeter’s wrecked side and attached itself like a limpet to the open wound. The remaining raiders kept circling the starship, drawing Exeter’s meager fire. Five of the tiny ships flamed out in the path of the starship’s crippled weapons. Someone with some skill had found their way to the targeting controls.

Or maybe, Greg reflected, thinking of the futile shots before the impact, they were just luckier than they had been before.

A moment later the reconstruction looped back to the beginning, and Greg dismissed it. “Audio?” he prompted.

A voice began to speak, garbled by digital artifacting. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” a deep voice said. Greg recognized Captain Çelik. “We are under attack. Syndicate raiders. We’re down to one gun, no shuttles. All ships in the area, please respond. Emergency. All ships—”