Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

A Paperback Original 2016

Copyright © Elizabeth Bonesteel 2016

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover design by Richard Aquan

Cover illustration by Chris McGrath

Elizabeth Bonesteel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008137809

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780008137816

Version: 2016-02-17

Dedication

For Debbie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part II

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part III

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
T minus 25 years—CCSS Phoenix

Sixty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

Kate ran toward the Phoenix’s infirmary, grumbling with frustration. When she’d told Captain Kelso they could evacuate quickly she had expected more than five minutes’ notice, and now there was no way they’d transfer everything in time. They had moved their patients and started shifting the most essential drugs, but she had fewer than half her everyday remedies, and almost no tools at all. At this rate, she would be practicing frontier medicine on the nine-week trip back to Earth. If anyone had a heart attack or a compound fracture in that time, Andy Kelso was going to be dealing with some injuries of his own.

She passed one of her clinicians running in the other direction, his arms full of vacuum-sealed pouches. “Last of the antigen packs,” he told her.

“I’ll get the scope,” she called over her shoulder. “Stay in the res wing.”

“Aye aye, Chief!” She heard his pace pick up.

“Fifty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

She turned and entered the infirmary, frowning at the number of people still rummaging through the shelves. “Didn’t I tell you people to get the hell out of here?”

Amy was shoveling topical healers into a bag. “Big bang,” she said tersely. “People will be bleeding.”

“Not if it goes as planned,” Kate reminded her, opening a cabinet and pulling out a portable medical scanner. Her scalpel kit followed, and she took a moment to strap it around her arm.

“What part of this mission has gone as planned?”

Kate was not the only one who laughed at that. Tension release, she knew; they’d all be less manic once this was over, and they had the long ride home to reflect. She would have time to digest what had happened, and figure out how to tell Tom the story without scaring the hell out of him. She didn’t want to end up using all her precious shore leave dealing with his feelings of protectiveness, but she supposed it served her right for marrying a man who hated the Corps.

“Forty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

“Okay, that’s it,” she declared, clapping her hands. “Everybody out. Now. That’s an order. Move your ass or I write you up.”

The others tightened their arms around their loads of supplies, and turned to leave. Amy glanced back at Kate. “You coming?”

“You think I’m planning on dying here while you assholes run off?”

Amy waited while Kate grabbed the microscope. The two women ran up the hallway together, heading for the bulkhead separating the residential wing from the ship’s main engine room and weapons locker.

“Thirty seconds to detonation. Please—”

“‘—evacuate the area,’” Kate and Amy finished simultaneously. They exchanged a smile and passed through the open bulkhead, following the long hallway through the residential area and into the main cafeteria. There they found the medical staff seated around one long table, strapped into the sturdy chairs. Raban, Kate’s head nurse, had saved her a seat.

She would tell Greg all of it, Kate decided, no matter what she censored for Tom. Her son loved all of this just as she did, danger be damned, and he pestered her for every detail whenever she was home. She had felt from the day he was born that the Corps was his destiny, but now—twelve years later, watching him tread the line between stringy little boy and thoughtful young man—she knew she was right, in ways she had never imagined. He would be part of all this soon, and he would be the one bringing home fantastic stories for her.

She stowed her rescued equipment under the table and sat next to Raban, flashing him a grateful smile. He often reminded her of her son, although he was twice the boy’s age: effortlessly handsome, with dark, thick hair and serious gray eyes. When Greg had been a baby his eyes had been blue, but time had drained them of color, and left behind a stormy shade streaked through with black. Exotic eyes. Tom’s eyes. Greg had her fine features—and her mercurial temper—but he had his father’s eyes.

“You okay?” Raban asked.

He was perceptive like Greg, too. She gave him a tight smile. “I feel like I’ve just abandoned my childhood home.”

“You could have said no,” he reminded her. “It had to be unanimous, remember?”

“It’s worth it,” she said. He kept looking at her, and she made herself smile more easily. “Besides, it never hurts having a man like Andy Kelso owe you a favor, does it?”

“He already owes you,” Raban pointed out, but he smiled back, letting her off the hook.

“Twenty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

Raban clutched the edge of the table, frowning as he looked around the room at people spinning in their chairs, running around and changing places in the last seconds available. “We work with idiots, did you know that?”

Kate watched the people she served with, the people who knew her better than her own family. “We work with people who know when to have fun,” she corrected. On impulse, she put her hand over his, and gripped it hard.

“Ten seconds to detonation.”

In the distance, she heard the heavy bulkhead creaking as it lurched closed. She wondered if it would hold; as far as she knew they had never used it before.

“Nine.”

There was a comforting thunk as the bulkhead locked into place, and she took a breath.

“Eight.”

She realized, belatedly, that along with her infirmary, the gymnasium was on the wrong side of the bulkhead as well. It was going to be a very long trip back.

“Seven.”

So many missions she had been part of, in her years with the Corps. So many causes, so many battles.

“Six.”

So many missed opportunities. So many mistakes.

“Five.”

But not this time. This time … they had been soon enough.

“Four.”

This time, they were right.

“Three.”

She thought of Meg, her daughter, her beautiful young woman, and what she looked like with the sun silvering her wild, dark curls. She thought of Greg, still mostly a boy, and the twinkle in his eyes when he was trying not to laugh.

“Two.”

She thought of Tom, her husband, her soul mate, who watched her leave time after time and still waited for her, patient and constant and full of love. Sometimes she missed him more than life.

This time, when she got home, maybe she’d stay a little longer.

One.

PART I

CHAPTER 1
Volhynia

Another round, please,” Elena said to the bartender.

The man’s expression did not change, but she thought he looked at her a moment longer than necessary. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. She knew what he was thinking; she was thinking it herself: They’ve had too much to drink already.

Her eyes caught a familiar face in the mirror behind the bar, and she turned, singling out Jessica. Her friend was in her element: surrounded by rowdy, cheerful strangers, red curls bouncing as she laughed and joked with the crowd. Jess thrived as the center of attention. Elena wished she had more of Jess’s confidence, wondering again why she had agreed to spend her meager shore leave in a crowded place where her dearest wish was to be ignored.

Because it was better than staying home.

She had to admit that Jessica had done her research. Volhynia’s capital city of Novanadyr was crowded with tourist traps, but Byko’s, despite the crowd and the noise level, had an air of sophistication. The bar served not just the flavored beers so often favored by tourists, but also a wide variety of subtler brews the colony did not export. Indeed, there were a number of local patrons, and even one man in a PSI uniform, drinking quietly at a corner of the bar, as serene as if he were the only customer in the place.

There were plenty in the crowd who were loud and stupid at this hour, but the atmosphere seemed upbeat, the music was bluesy and seductive, and the smell of fresh hops filled the air. Elena had spent interminable evenings in environments far less inviting, but the environment hadn’t put the knots in her neck. No, it was not the fault of the bar that her nerves were so frayed.

Sitting here, amid the amiable chaos, she found herself wondering for a fleeting moment if she shouldn’t have taken Danny up on his invitation to spend the evening with him instead. He had broached the subject just that morning, approaching her nervously after breakfast, palpably relieved when she had agreed to listen.

“There’s this scientists’ bar,” he told her. “Eggheads and weak drinks. Quiet, they say, although they’ll rip you off like everywhere else in the Fifth Sector.” She had laughed at that, and almost said yes. But she did turn him down, albeit gently and with some regret. Now she thought he would at least have been someone she knew.

The locals, of course, had come out in force when Galileo had taken up orbit. Jessica hadn’t warned her, but Elena realized she had been foolish not to figure out for herself what would happen. Volhynia was a well-populated colony world—there were nearly four thousand in Novanadyr alone—but there was nothing like new blood.

They knew we’d be here, Elena thought irritably. And they’re hunting us like wildebeest.

Not that it didn’t go both ways. Most Corps starships had downtime every twenty days, sometimes more often, but Galileo’s crew had been six weeks without formal shore leave. Ordinarily they encountered something to shake up their fine-tuned routine—diplomatic crisis, terraformer malfunction, crop failure—but the Fifth Sector was largely prosperous and free of conflict. Six weeks of peace, it turned out, was mind-numbingly dull. Elena could not blame her crewmates for seeking out something—anything—that was new. Had she been a different sort of person she might have enjoyed this place with her friends, instead of wishing herself away from them, wandering her starship’s wide, empty halls.

She slipped a finger behind her ear to query her comm for the time: 2350. Too early and too late. At midnight the city’s power grid would be shut down for almost a full hour as the nearby neutron star swept the planet with an electromagnetic pulse. She would never make it to the spaceport in time, and she doubted the dispatcher would take kindly to her loitering until the lights came back on. Her eyes swept the crowd again, and she wondered if the dispatcher was open to bribes.

She had almost resolved to head for the spaceport and plead her case when she heard a step behind her. She closed her eyes, mustered a polite smile, and turned.

He was taller than she was, with straw-yellow hair and an indisputably nice smile, and he bore a heart-wrenching resemblance to Danny. Damn Jessica—what had she been thinking, sending this one over? She wasn’t usually so oblivious.

“Can I help you with the drinks?” the man asked.

He had a nice voice, a little dark and grainy, with that broad accent they spoke with here. He was handsome, friendly, not entirely pie-eyed—and he left her cold. As she looked at him, thinking of what to say, she realized she was done pretending to have fun.

The regret in the smile she gave him was genuine. “You’re very kind,” she said, willing all the flip sarcasm out of her voice. “Actually, you can take them back to the table for me. I’m afraid I’m not staying.”

This news took a moment to penetrate. “You sure?” he said, still genial, still easygoing. “Your friend, there, she seems to think you could use some fun and games. Doesn’t have to, you know, be anything.”

He was nice, this one. Under different circumstances, with more time … he would still look like Danny. “My friend,” she told him, “has a good heart and a deaf ear. If you think of it, please tell her to enjoy herself without being concerned for me.”

He flashed her that smile again. “If you change your mind …” he offered, then moved away, and she turned back to the bar to settle the tab. She was struggling to remember how much one was supposed to tip in Novanadyr when a voice came from the corner of the bar.

“You were very kind to him,” said the man in the PSI uniform.

He had not moved since they had arrived, seated comfortably on his own, nursing something served in a small, smoke-colored glass. He was dressed in black from head to toe, clothes fitted and well-worn, black hair pulled back from his face into a tight, short braid—the uniform worn by PSI in all six sectors. An anomaly in the crowd of tourists and natives.

“He was polite,” she replied. “There was no reason not to be.”

She wondered, as she had when she had first spotted him, if he was an impostor. Real PSI soldiers were rarely seen on colonies, living primarily in nomadic tribes, many of them spending their entire lives—birth to death—on massive generation ships that isolated themselves from Central Gov. Central maintained authority over colony worlds, supporting local government while regulating interstellar trade and rule of law, but PSI as a people kept mostly to themselves, appearing only to deliver supplies to colonies in need … or, as was rumored, at least, to steal necessities from a passing freighter.

On a wealthy colony like Volhynia, PSI would be seen as anachronistic, even threatening; a PSI soldier at a local bar would be an attraction. Or, more likely, a wasp to be provoked. But if he was an impostor, she would have expected him to be making the most of it: courting attention, and drinking a good deal more than what the bartender had poured into that tiny glass.

She waited, wondering if he would say something else, then finished paying for the drinks. When he spoke again, she almost jumped.

“May I offer you some advice?” he asked.

His pronunciation was clipped and exotic, his speech mannered and slightly slow, as if he was translating in his head before he spoke. Most PSI were reputed to be multilingual, and some joined as children, or even young adults. She would have no way of guessing on which colony this one may have started his life.

“All right,” she said.

“You should not keep company with children.”

He was staring straight ahead, not looking at her. He had an angular profile punctuated by a substantial, aquiline nose and a neatly trimmed mustache. A masculine face, and yet his lips were full, almost feminine. His eyes were wide and deep set, and in the dim light of the bar looked jet-black; but they caught light from all around, giving him an expression of intelligence and good humor. She could not, if asked, have honestly called him handsome; but there was something in his bearing, something immediate and physical that she suspected made people watch him even when he did not move.

“Are you offering me an alternative?”

At that he smiled, although he still did not look at her. “I take my own advice.”

The amusement in his eyes was not cruel, but she still found herself annoyed. “Do I seem so young, then?” she asked him.

“My dear lady, you are young.”

He had a nice voice, almost impossibly deep, with a hint of music. She wondered if he sang. “I’m not that young.”

He took pity on her at that, and turned to meet her eyes. His direct gaze was sharper, and she realized that whatever he was drinking had not intoxicated him at all. “What age are you?” he asked her curiously.

“Thirty-two.”

He gave a brief, dismissive snort. “When you were born,” he said, “I was well into my twenties, and I had seen more horrors than you will all of your life.” He turned away again.

By her estimation, she had seen enough horror for anyone, but he would have no way of knowing. “So if I am so young,” she deduced, “then surely I’m in the right crowd. Me and all these boys.”

“Possibly,” he allowed. “But these boys can do nothing for you.”

“That’s not what they think.”

He scoffed again, still good-humored. “These boys believe that because they know the mechanics, they know how to make love to a woman. They are wrong.”

She thought for a moment, an old memory surfacing. “My cousin Peter used to say something about young men,” she remembered. “‘Too busy loving themselves to effectively fuck anybody else.’”

At that he put down his glass and let out a loud bark of laughter. She could not help but smile herself. “He tends to be crass,” she said, half-apologetic.

“Observant, though,” he said, favoring her with a genuine smile. She saw him focus, as if he had not really looked at her before. “Tell me, dear lady,” he asked her, curious. “Why are you here?”

Those dark eyes of his, in addition to sharpness, held a genuine warmth that pleased her more than she would have expected. “I thought we’d established that,” she tried, but he shook his head.

“You told that boy you were planning to leave,” he reminded her. “I believe you meant it.”

This time she was the one who looked away. “I came here because I promised Jessica,” she confessed, waving toward her friend. “She says I’ve been irritable lately. She’s a big believer in sex to treat … everything. Irritability, exhaustion, insomnia, the common cold. She doesn’t understand that it doesn’t work for everybody.”

“So you came here to placate her.”

“I figured I’d stay for a while, then creep out to a hotel somewhere and let her yell at me in the morning when she’s too hungover to put much energy behind it.”

“So if you are not interested in drunken children in spaceport bars,” he asked, “what do you do? Surely there are people on your ship.”

That was not a short-answer question, and it was a far more personal subject than she should have been comfortable discussing with someone she had just met. “Shipboard … can get messy. There’s only two hundred and twenty-six of us, and it gets very insular. You either have to be serious, or casual like Jess.”

“And can you not find true love on board your ship?”

How easily he leapt from sex to love. Strange, how familiar he felt to her. “Sometimes.” She thought of Danny, of his crooked smile as he tried to charm her that morning. It would have been easier than she wanted to admit to say yes to him, to have met him tonight, to have fallen right back into everything that had gone wrong. “But reality tends to strangle it.”

She caught sympathy in his eyes, and braced herself, but he was perceptive enough to let it go. Definitely not a boy.

“So on your ship you must choose from casual lovers or untenable affairs,” he said. “I can see why you were persuaded to come down here.”

“It did make some sense at the time,” she told him, relieved to have the subject return to the present. “In practice, though—my God, is there anything less alluring than a pack of strangers so drunk they won’t remember their own names, not to mention yours? How do people do this?”

“There are alternatives to drunken fools, you know.”

“You already said you weren’t interested.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, lifting his drink. “I’d forgotten.” But he couldn’t suppress the half smile on his lips.

She began to understand what they were doing. “Story of my life,” she said lightly. “The only men worth talking to aren’t interested.”

And at that they were looking at each other, and something inside of her turned. And she understood, in that moment, what came so effortlessly to Jessica in places like this.

She dropped her eyes, and saw him set down his small glass, looking back into the mirror behind the bar. “How much time off do they give you?” he asked her.

“Twelve hours, by the clock,” she told him. “I have to report back by oh-nine hundred hours tomorrow.” She took a breath; nerves had come upon her.

“That is not a lot of time,” he remarked, and she wasn’t sure whether to attribute his tone to disappointment or disapproval.

“It’s enough for some,” she said. “Usually it’s enough for me.”

He looked over at her again, and she felt her face grow hot before she looked up to meet his eyes. His gaze, no less intense, had become serious, and she thought perhaps he was finding her unexpected as well. He shifted a little, turning toward her.

Without warning the lights went off, and a rowdy cheer rose from the crowd. Elena blinked, disoriented; the dark, while diluted by the bioluminescent sidewalks outside the bar’s windows, was more absolute than anything she ever experienced back home, where the ship’s operational lights were everywhere. She had forgotten to watch the time, and now they had hit the Dead Hour. Everything but emergency systems would be off-line for nearly an hour.

After a few seconds the bar’s interior was lit with a bank of portable lamps mounted high on the walls; the room was nearly as bright as before, but the light was cooler, and everything was faded to monochrome. Her companion was painted with light and shadow, lending drama to the strong angles of his face. He looked pale in the blue-white glow, and strangely unreal; she found she wanted to reach out just to see if he was really there.

And then she was startled by a man lurching between the two of them, his hands slapping into the bar as he kept himself from stumbling to the ground. He had bright blue eyes and hair as jet-black as her companion’s, but his eyes were rheumy and unfocused, and he wore a deep scowl. She did not recognize him—he was not part of the entourage that had coalesced around Jessica—but he must have been in the pub for a long time. He was very, very drunk.

He straightened himself up against the edge of the bar, and turned to look at her. “You do realize what you’re talking to,” he slurred, his voice overloud.

This one she was less inclined to be nice to. Beyond his attitude, his timing was abysmal. “You do realize who I’m talking to is none of your business,” she snapped.

It was a tone that had effectively driven away many men over the years. This one was too drunk to listen. “You military types,” he spat bitterly. “You come here and you flood our city and you talk to us because we’re quaint. I’ll bet you think pirates are quaint. But he’s nothing but a thief and a murderer.”

Her companion cleared his throat. “I believe what she means is that this conversation does not concern you.” His words were polite, but there was ice in his tone. “Perhaps you’d like to return to your table.”

“Fuck off,” the man shot over his shoulder; and then he took a step closer to Elena, millimeters from touching her. “You like bad boys, little girl? I can be as bad as you want.”

And at that, her temper flared. “What I like,” she said deliberately, holding her ground, “are people with the brains to get lost when they’re not wanted.”

At her words his face grew ugly, his brows drawing together, his lips pressing into a thin line. “If you think I’m going to let you walk out of here with this”—he spat out a word in the local dialect that she didn’t understand—“you must be a bigger whore than he is.”

None of which made any sense, she realized, but then he clamped a hand over her arm, and she got a sense of his strength, even inebriated. He moved toward her, and she felt the heat of his body and smelled the liquor on his breath, and she had just enough time to think Oh, hell, I’m going to have to hit him, before she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and his hand was wrenched off of her, and then he was on the floor.

Her companion stood over him, arms and legs relaxed, his hands tightened into fists. “This woman,” he said clearly, as the drunk stared up at him, “has made her wishes very clear.” His eyes, so light and amused when talking with her, were full of a dangerous calm. “If you ignore them again, I swear to you, you will not see the sun rise.”

She took in the two men, saw the drunk shift against the wood floor, and then drop his eyes. He rolled, with more dignity than she would have thought possible, and climbed to his feet; then he brushed past, not looking at either of them, heading toward the exit with some haste. Her companion’s eyes followed him, deadly and dangerous, until he had disappeared.

The room, which had gone quiet when the drunk had fallen, began to buzz with conversation again, the confrontation already old news. Elena felt heat rising to her face. Holy shit.

The man watched the door for a moment. “You are unhurt?” he asked.

She made a small affirmative sound, and he turned, meeting her eyes. The danger in his expression had been replaced by ordinary annoyance—and a shadow of regret. “You believe I have overstepped.”

He was standing closer to her than he had been. He smelled of spices—cardamom, she thought, and maybe rosemary—and something sweet she could not identify. “Um,” she managed, then took a breath. “No, actually. I would have had to break his arm. Your way, at least he goes home in one piece.”

“Hm.” He turned back to the door, still frowning. “Now you are making me wish I had let you deal with him.”

Minutes ago she would have laughed at this, and resumed their light flirting. Now she could do nothing but stare at him, distracted by the way he shifted as he stood, by wondering what his hair felt like or whether he needed to shave. After a moment he looked back at her, his expression still dark. It should have made her shrink away, but she found she could no longer move.

He seemed to realize then how he looked, because he shook himself, and the last of the irritation fell away. He studied her face, absorbed. “But there is still something wrong,” he observed, and she nodded.

“It’s just—” This was all so odd, and yet it felt so familiar, as if she had been here before, would be here again. “I came here,” she explained, “thinking I knew what I wanted. I’m not sure I know anymore.”

He kept studying her, and she felt herself blush more deeply; but she wanted to look back at him, wanted him to see what she was thinking. Something flickered momentarily over his face, fierce and hungry, and it was all she could do not to reach out to him, to fall toward him, just to see what he would do.

“Perhaps we should discuss it somewhere else,” he suggested.

She could have left then. She could have told him, honestly, that she was not brave enough. That was true, for a part of her. But that part of her was being shouted down, and she did not want to listen to it anymore.

She nodded.

He turned to the bartender and paid his tab, efficiently but not hurriedly. Then he met her eyes again and waited.

Elena pushed away from the bar and headed for the door. The man in black followed her out.

CHAPTER 2

It was foolishness, of course. Trey was clear on that. Even as he followed her out of the bar, distracted by the easy sway of her hips, he knew he should walk her back to the spaceport and send her home.

He also knew he wouldn’t.

He had watched her since she arrived at the pub, trailing behind her boisterous friend like a silent and elegant shadow, uncomfortable and out of place and simply breathtakingly lovely. It was her beauty he had dwelled on, at first: her tall, slim figure, elegant and regal in her telltale gray and black uniform; the curve of her jaw; the dark hair tumbling in curls into her wide, expressive brown eyes. It took him longer to recognize the depth of her discomfort, and longer still to detect the intensity of her desire to escape. She was laughing and joking with the others, but she was not drinking liquor, and he realized she was deflecting more than making conversation. When she had come up to the bar he had admired her walk, but he had noticed how careful she was not to touch anyone as she worked her way through the crowd.

He had not planned on talking to her—during his years with PSI he had learned not to socialize with Central Corps soldiers—but watching her, he had become curious. Listening to her gentle dismissal of the flirtatious young man, intrigued. And upon speaking to her … She was so refreshingly direct, and, much to his astonishment, interested. He tended to dismiss romantic attention as a by-product of his past, but she had said nothing of his former profession, and had not even reacted when that jackass Luvidovich had brought it up.

Damn the man. Trey would have to kill him someday, he was certain. He could not bring himself to view that eventuality with much regret.

The evening was cool, and felt cooler lit only by the faint glow of the bricks edging the sidewalk. “Are you cold?” he asked, looking down at her. In the dim light she looked exotic and alien, a strange creature from another world.

She shook her head and smiled, glancing at him with that odd mix of shyness and desire he had noticed in the pub. “I grew up outside of Juneau,” she explained. He must have looked confused, because she laughed. “It’s in Alaska. On Earth. Very far north. This would be a warm summer night.”

“I have never been to Earth,” he told her. “Is it all so cold?”

“No. In fact, most of it isn’t. A lot of it’s hot, even uninhabitable. But I lived in a nice place.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Never.”

He stopped, and turned to her, and watched the wind tug at her hair. “May I kiss you?” he asked.

Even in the dark he could see her blushing, the color warming her cheeks and her jaw and her throat, and he wondered how much of her that blush was covering. Her eyes were still shy, but she nodded anyway.

He took a step toward her. A lock of hair blew across her cheek; before she could brush it aside he caught it, rubbing the silky curl between his fingers, then tucking it carefully behind her ear. He looked into her eyes, letting his fingers trail across her jaw. Her skin was cool and smooth, and he traced the line of her cheekbone, then reached up to smooth her hair from her forehead. She moved toward him, first a small step, then leaning into his touch, almost imperceptibly. Her lips parted slightly, and he heard her breath quicken.

He lifted his other hand, placing his palms on either side of her face, tangling his fingers in her soft, dark hair. Her eyes drifted closed, and he studied her long lashes, shadowing her moonlit skin. He took a breath, inhaling the scent of her: clean, feminine skin, something floral in her hair. His own eyes closed as he brushed her lips with his own.

Her mouth was warm and soft, and she made a small sound, kissing him back. Their exploration was gentle at first; but when she pulled his lower lip between her own, tasting him with a feather-light touch, the electricity within him flared bright and sharp. His hands tightened in her hair and he kissed her harder, parting her lips with his, tangling his tongue with hers. She leaned into him, pulling his tongue deeper into her mouth, passionate and hungry. He felt her hands running over his shoulders, felt her palms on the nape of his neck, running up over his hair, pulling his head closer. Unable to resist any longer, he reached around her waist and pulled her against him, and he felt the warmth of her all along his body. She pressed herself closer, wrapping her arms around his neck, and he knew she could feel how much he wanted her.

What seemed remarkable was how much she wanted him in return.

It was so easy, kissing her here on the street, with the moonlight and the luminous sidewalk and the cool breeze, lost in the heat of her. It would be easy, as well, to pull her into the shadows, to shove their clothes aside and take her, fast and hard, in the alley just meters away. As she kissed him and touched him and pulled at him, he even thought she would be willing.

But he knew it would not be enough.

He pulled away from her, keeping his arms around her, and they swayed together, disoriented. He opened his eyes to look at her, and found all of the shyness gone.

“My flat is a block away,” he told her, surprised at the unsteadiness of his voice. “Will you come home with me?”

“Yes,” she said, breathless, and she let her fingers wander over his eyebrows and across his temples. He closed his eyes, savoring her touch, and after a moment he reached up to take her hands in his.

“If you do not stop that,” he told her, smiling, “we will not make it that far.”

She laughed, delighted. She was so open, and so lovely, and he wanted his hands on her more than he had wanted anything in a long time. He kept her right hand in his left and turned, and they walked down the sidewalk together. They did not speak again, but somehow he felt lighter and more comfortable than he had with anyone in the six months since he had returned to Volhynia.

When they reached his building he led her up the front stairs. She looked around, curious, eyes darting from the steps to the window to the fingerprint lock on the door.

“Old technology,” he said, following her eyes.

“Still harder to hack than a voice lock,” she remarked, “and a lot cheaper.”

She was right, but it was not a fact he would have expected her to have at her fingertips. He realized, then, that he did not know what she did on this ship of hers.

He did not even know her name.

He opened the door, finding the entryway lit by the moon shining through the skylight. The stairs did not bother her at all; she was not even winded when they reached the top. Instead she was looking up through the window in the ceiling. The moon lit her face in the dark, and she smiled. “It’s so beautiful,” she said softly. “I never miss the sun. But moonlight …”

“This does not surprise me,” he said to her. “It suits you, the moonlight.”

He stood aside for her and she moved into the flat, leaning against the wall by the alcove. The light of the moon turned the room blue-gray, casting cool shadows against the planes of her face. The door closed behind him and he stood opposite her, the kitchen at his back. He felt strangely formal, like he was missing part of a ritual. Like it would have been so much easier if they had stayed outside.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No,” she said, and it crossed his mind that now she, having made up her mind, was more at ease than he was. “But you could come here. If you like.”

She held out her hands, and he took them. “What is that scent in your hair?” he asked, longing to bury his hands in it again.

“Lilac,” she told him. She let his hands go and laid her fingers at his waist, and he felt suddenly how thin his shirt was, how much he wanted to feel her fingers against his skin. “It’s Jessica’s,” she admitted, and looked briefly embarrassed.

“It is lovely,” he told her. He pressed his lips to her forehead, then nuzzled her hair, inhaling the scent. “But what you are doing to me has nothing to do with flowers.” He moved his lips down her cheek, along her jaw, to the pulse on her neck. He heard her inhale sharply, and her head fell back, baring her throat to him. He kissed her smooth skin, then nipped at her; she moaned, just a little, at the touch of his teeth, and that was enough.

He moved to kiss her lips, but this time there was no preamble of gentleness, no feeling each other out. The kiss was fierce, devouring, and he leaned against her, pushing her hard against the wall. Her arms reached around him, and her hands went to his head; she pulled the leather tie from his braid and let his heavy hair fall around her fingers. One of her hands trailed down, and he felt her pulling the tail of his shirt from his trousers. When her fingers touched the skin of his back, all reason disappeared. He unzipped her shirt, and she managed to let go of him long enough to shrug it off and toss it to the ground; he dispensed quickly with her undershirt, and then he had her breasts in his hands, and he kissed her over and over, pressing his hips against her, so hard his clothes were hopelessly uncomfortable.

She moaned as he touched her, his thumbs brushing over her stiff nipples as she arched against him. On impulse he released her mouth long enough to drop his head and pull one nipple between his lips, tugging on it with his teeth. She held on to his head and pressed her breast to his mouth, and whispered harder, and he sucked as hard as he dared, biting down enough he would have thought it was painful. But she did not object. She said God, yes and please and anything you want and he could not wait any longer.

Somehow they rid themselves of the rest of their clothes, and he took a breath, feeling the heat of her skin against his, painfully aware of his raging erection brushing against the cleft in her skin. She was wet and slick, and, he noticed, just the right height.

“Here?” he asked her, and she beamed at him, a gorgeous, bright-eyed smile.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

He slid one hand over her ass and down one toned thigh, and pulled her knee up alongside his hip. She wrapped her leg around him, pulling him closer; and with little maneuvering, he pushed himself inside of her.

She cried out, an unmistakable sound of pleasure, and he felt her muscles tighten around him. He found himself groaning as well. She was tight and warm and so lovely, so soft, and he drove into her again and again, grateful for the wall holding her up, riding the wave of pleasure higher and higher, and every moment he thought it was going to break, she pulled him in deeper, devoured his mouth, ran her hands over his back, into his hair … Good God, I would drown in her if I could, and that was his last coherent thought. When she finally gasped and called out, over and over, her body convulsing, clutching at him, inside and out, surrendered completely to pleasure, he went over the edge with her, pounding again and again, oblivious to everything else, letting the waves wash over him as she moved with him, hanging on for dear life, until all was spent into stillness.

They stood, unmoving, wrapped around each other, for several minutes. Trey was not entirely sure he could do anything else. As he came back to himself he found her stroking his hair and nuzzling the inside of his neck. He glanced down at her and she smiled, her eyes light and contented.

“I may fall down,” she confessed.

He laughed. “Let us see what we can do about that.” He pushed away from her a little, testing his legs; they seemed to be willing, for the moment, to hold him up. He reached for her again, and she put her arms around his neck. He wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her; she wrapped her legs around him, linking her ankles behind his knees. It seemed as practical a way as any to travel.

He carried her past the bathroom door into the bedroom, enjoying the weight of her in his arms, her limbs so unself-consciously embracing him. Gently he deposited her on the blanket-covered bed, and managed to lie down next to her without letting her go.

He closed his eyes, pleasure still warming his blood. It was not as if his recent life had been without women, he reflected. It had just been so long since he had been with one who had given herself over so completely. Since Valeria, perhaps. More than a year.

He had no inclination to linger on the past.

He pulled her closer, and she draped a long leg over him, tucking her head under his chin. “If I had known you were coming,” he told her, one hand skimming her waist to come to rest on her hip, “I would have ordered a skylight in here as well.”

She laughed, and he felt the vibration of it against his chest. “You should have one anyway,” she said. “It’s easier to sleep if you can see the stars.”

“I will tell you,” he admitted, wondering at his newfound gregariousness, “I have never had trouble sleeping. Out there, I was well-known for it. I could sleep on my feet if there was a need. But I did know a few, like you, who needed windows.”

She shifted against him, and he was surprised to feel a twinge of desire returning. “I used to fall asleep in the engine room,” she told him. “There’s this catwalk there, with these big floor-to-ceiling windows. They take them out for maintenance sometimes, when she’s docked, but the rest of the time, it’s the best view on the ship. A few months in, the captain heard about me sleeping there, and he found this little unused storeroom with one windowed wall and had it converted for my quarters.”

“He is thoughtful, then? Your captain.”

She was quiet a moment. “In some ways,” she said. He was not surprised she found it a complicated question. Command required separation, and often callousness, and even those who understood were not always comfortable with being on the receiving end. “Mostly … he is observant, and he is good at knowing what keeps us efficient.” She looked up at him. “I used to think, sometimes … There are these moments, in life, when you just stop and realize that everything is just as it should be. Everything. I had that, a little. For a while. But even now—I try to remember that life doesn’t have to be perfect to be valuable.”

He brought his hand to her face again, brushing his knuckles against her cheekbone. “Are you always so kind?” he asked her.

“Only to people I’m in bed with.”

Her hand was resting on his rib cage, and he felt the heat of her fingertips and wanted to pull her on top of him. Somehow this woman was turning him back into a teenager. “It seems to me,” he observed, lacing his fingers in hers, “that you are not the sort of woman who should be finding herself in bed alone.”

“Now you sound like Jessica,” she said.

“She is right on the cure,” he told her, “but not the problem. You are a beautiful woman. Regardless of your ship’s shortsighted population, you should be worshipped, not sent out to try your luck at a spaceport bar.”

“My luck worked out well this time,” she pointed out.

“I am serious.” Actually, he was outraged, but that seemed presumptuous. “This fool, that you were in love with. What happened?”

A shadow crossed her face. He had seen it before, in the bar, when she had dismissed the possibility of true love surviving on a starship; but either he had missed the depth of her pain, or he simply read her better now. “The usual,” she said, and he thought her lightness was feigned. “He lied, and I found out. I tried to forgive him. I failed.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Two and a half months.”

He winced. “Damn. I am sorry, my dear. I did not mean to remind you of fresh grief. Especially here.”

She shook her head. “But it doesn’t hurt to remember it here.”

“I am your first lover since then.”

“Yes.” She smiled, and some of the wickedness was back. “You do not remind me of him at all. And that is a compliment.”

Just then he heard a sound, and realized it was her stomach rumbling. “Good Lord, is that you? Are you hungry?”

“Starved, actually,” she admitted, looking embarrassed. “I was too nervous earlier to eat much supper.”

“This,” he declared, “I can fix.” He sat up, and her hand slid over his arm to rest on his back. “On your feet, woman,” he commanded. “I must give you fuel. I have every intention of your needing it.”

She followed him out to the kitchen. He leaned down to retrieve his clothes, pulling on his shorts and handing her his shirt. She shrugged it on, not bothering to button it, and he took a moment to take her in. He was never going to be able to look at that shirt the same way again.

Shaking himself, he turned and opened the refrigerator, a cool draft escaping into the darkened room. “You have a sweet tooth,” he assumed.

“God, yes,” she said, moving in behind him to look over his shoulder. “What do you have?”

He retrieved his latest experiment from the top shelf. He was only on the second stage—he was still deciding whether to wrap it in pastry, or to thicken it and coat it in some expensive, off-world chocolate—but he thought, so far, that it was rather wonderful on its own. He pulled open a drawer to retrieve a spoon, and scooped a little out of the bowl.

“Here,” he said, holding the spoon out to her. “Tell me what you think.”

She took it, glancing at him, then gamely took a taste. In an instant her expression changed to something not unlike what he had seen a few minutes ago by the alcove.

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “What is that? Cream, and lemon, and … hazelnut?”

“You have a discerning palate,” he told her, pleased. “I’ve also added a splash of rum, just to deepen the fruit flavor. I was worried it was a bit too much.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s perfect. Lovely. Is there more?”

So he handed her the bowl, and they wandered into the living room, and he sat next to her on the couch while she consumed his experiment. “You made this,” she said, as she ate it all, bite by bite.

He nodded. “It is my profession. I am a dessert chef.”

“My goodness, yes you are,” she said. She scraped the bottom of the bowl and looked into it sadly. “I suppose that was all,” she sighed, and he laughed.

“There are a few others at earlier stages,” he told her. “Incomplete. I experiment, a bit, on my own.”

“Have you done this long?”

“Off and on, for about thirty years,” he told her.

“Was that your profession with PSI? Did you cook for them?”

He shook his head. “I was an officer,” he told her, deciding not to elaborate. “But Fyodor—he was our captain, and for most of my life there my mentor—loved to make desserts, and on the longer journeys he would always try something he had never made before. He would have me help him. After he retired, I kept on doing it.” It had been a comfort, one thing he had been able to keep constant after everything around him had changed.

“Is that why you came here?” she asked. “To be a chef?”

He paused. “In a way,” he told her at last. “I was born here. My sister has never left. Her husband died last year, and she asked me to come back and help her run her business. She has a café, so cooking for her made sense.” He felt a strange sense of relief, and of exposure; he had not spoken of Katya to anyone since he had come back.

He waited for her to ask why he had left, why he had stayed away for so long; but it was Katya that had caught her imagination. “Are you close to her?” she asked, with something like wistfulness.

He shook his head. “She was very young when I left. I wrote to her … but I was a stranger. Now she asks that I tell no one how we are related.” It was not the whole truth, but it was enough.

“Why?”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “We are not always thought of with charity,” he told her, although he was certain she knew it. “Katya believes PSI is full of evil, selfish thieves, running from their responsibilities.” He regarded her, suddenly curious. “I’m rather surprised you do not.” He had always assumed Central Corps collaborated with PSI only grudgingly, when left with no other options. It had not occurred to him that Central, mistrust notwithstanding, might recognize the value in an alternate approach.

The woman’s eyes narrowed a little as she considered her next words. “I know what people say,” she admitted. “But I know what they say of us as well. There is truth and lie in all of it. I may be loyal to Central, but I know enough to understand why some would want nothing to do with them. And given my own choices, people choosing to live their lives and raise their families on a starship instead of a dusty bit of rock makes a lot of sense to me. Out here … you may think I’m naive, but I have seen things. I have seen people starving. I’ve seen the remains of colonies that turned to civil war when they ran out of food. And I have seen people who have survived this fate, or dodged it entirely, only because PSI intervened when we couldn’t. You are called thieves, and perhaps strictly speaking that is sometimes true,” she concluded. “But I don’t believe thievery is always wrong.”

It surprised him, her vision of his family, and he felt vaguely ashamed of his own assumptions. “I would not have expected a Central soldier to have such a subtle perception of reality,” he admitted. “I would not think you were allowed.”

She grinned, and her eyes danced. “We are not all bored idiots with guns,” she told him. “The truth is, out here we see everything. And on a ship as small as ours … we must all agree, at least on some level, about right and wrong, no matter what the regulations say. The captain follows the rules when he can, but he’s also pragmatic. If it saves lives, he orders us to do the sorts of things PSI does every day, damn Central Gov, and he doesn’t lose a moment’s sleep over it.”

“I think I like this captain of yours.”

“You might, but for one thing: he has no sweet tooth.”

“I am outraged,” Trey declared. “Or perhaps I should feel sympathy.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” she told him. “When they ship us chocolate, he lets us have his share.”

He laughed. “I must admit, you soldiers appear to be less different from us than I have thought.”

“Because of chocolate?”

“Because the pleasures of being human,” he said, “seem to appeal to us all.”

She drew up her legs and knelt on the sofa, moving closer to him. “When you said, earlier, that I would need the fuel,” she asked, “what exactly did you mean?”

He took the bowl from her hand and leaned forward to place it on the table. “I should have thought that was obvious.”

“Tell me anyway,” she whispered.

He leaned back on the couch and reached his arm around her waist. Wearing his shirt, one oversized sleeve slipping off her shoulder, her breasts peeking out from behind the buttons, she looked somehow more enticing than she had completely nude. “I should like to make love to you,” he told her, drawing her closer, his free hand finding her breast and hefting it gently. “Here, on the sofa. Or the floor, if you prefer, although my preference would be first one, and then the other.” She had crawled into his lap, and he kissed her once, gently, tasting cream and hazelnut on her lips. “I would like to continue this until the sun rises and the day reclaims us both.” He moved to kiss her neck, nuzzling the hairline behind her ear. “Do you find this suggestion agreeable?”

She responded by moving closer until they were hip to hip, and she kissed him, deep and long and satisfied, and he thought the pleasures of being human would be a fine way to pass the night.

CHAPTER 3
Galileo

What is the half-life of the radiation produced by the destruction of a hybrid nuclear starlight engine?

Captain Greg Foster read the message again, then turned away to look out his office window. The planet of Volhynia filled the viewport, green plains and azure seas dotted with swirls of clouds, the stars shifting behind it as Galileo paralleled its orbit. All planets looked beautiful from up here, he reflected, no matter what lurked beneath the atmosphere. One of the loveliest planets he had ever seen was Liriel, an emerald jewel in a stable, six-planet star system. But Central’s fleet had struggled to evacuate the fifteen thousand colonists before the failure of their terraforming equipment had surrendered the surface to sulfur and methane. They had lost civilians. Few, in context, but Greg knew every name. He had been decorated for his work on Liriel, but he still counted it a personal failure.

The most important lessons, his mother had taught him, are the ones that go wrong. At least whatever was wrong with Volhynia was not in its atmosphere.

He turned back and reread the question. Mathematically it was a simple problem, one every Central Corps officer was expected to be able to solve without the aid of a computer. Depending on the size of the engine, radiation from the explosion would drop to tolerable levels anywhere from three to seven years later. That was a big reason nobody ran hybrid engines anymore; beyond the efficiency gains that had been made in pure starlight tech, the risks of failure were too high. Nobody wanted to block a travel corridor for such a long period of time, never mind irradiate a habitable planet. The hybrid design was inherently unstable, and nobody had been sorry to see it abandoned.

Curious, though, that only one Central starship had ever lost a hybrid engine. Curious that twenty-five years later, the site of the Phoenix’s destruction was still too hot for travel.

Conspiracy theories abounded. Everybody seemed to think Greg ought to care, that he ought to seek absolute proof of what had happened to his mother’s starship. When he was young, he had been caught up in unproven government conspiracies and rumors of alien invasion. He had almost let it destroy his life. Now he had been part of Central Corps for fifteen years, nine as captain of his own ship, and he had learned that the simplest answer was almost always the truth. Central did not have the resources for an expansive cover-up, even if it would have provided some benefit—and there was no discernible benefit to the loss of 456 trained soldiers.

What is the half-life of the radiation produced by the destruction of a hybrid nuclear starlight engine?

He swept his hand through the message, and it disappeared. “Galileo,” he asked, “what’s the current radiation level at the site of the Phoenix disaster?”

There was an almost imperceptible pause as his ship queried the larger net. “Current radiation levels at location 345.89.225,” Galileo told him in her warm androgynous voice, “are ambient 13, critical 22.2.”

Meaning you’d melt before you got anywhere near it. Greg put his thumbs over his eyes. “A nuclear starlight explosion nets what, sixteen, eighteen?”

“Nuclear starlight explosion yields are dependent on size, configuration, attendant materials, fuel levels, ionic—”

“Okay, okay,” Greg said, and the ship fell silent. Officially the Phoenix had not been carrying cargo. Deep space exploration had been her charter: the elusive search for alien life, which no one anymore thought would be successful. Boring stuff. Even the wormhole at the center of the Phoenix’s patrol territory was uninteresting, the meager secrets of its unapproachable entrance having long since been exhausted. His mother, before she left, had seemed unenthusiastic, despite her love of space travel.

There was no data on the Phoenix’s fuel levels, or anything else. Despite twenty-five years of long-range scans, the unique audio signature of the ship’s flight recorder—which might have provided them with everything from engine status to last-minute comms—had never been detected, despite the extensive debris. The recorder should have had sufficient shielding to survive the hybrid blast. Yet another anomaly that had never been explained.

“Assume one-half fuel level on a sixteen-ton D-10 config. What yield does that give you?”

His ship answered promptly. “Sixteen point one seven, repeating.”

Greg did some quick math. Assuming the maximum seven-year half-life, the Phoenix’s residual radiation should have hit ambient eight less than twelve years ago, ambient four six years after that. “So here’s a question,” he said. “What type of cargo might spike the previous explosion to produce radiation of fifty-six?”

“Armed hybrid torpedoes,” Galileo returned promptly. “Ellis Systems terraforming modules 16 and 45. Twelve kilos of dellinium ionic solids. Seventy tons of—”

“Stop.” The dellinium rumor was old, based on readings right after the explosion that had been corrupted by the nearby pulsar. Once the initial shock wave had passed, they found no evidence of dellinium at all, much less twelve kilos of the stuff. The Phoenix had carried no terraformers, and even if she had, Ellis had been a tiny research company at the time, not yet building heavy equipment. Weapons seemed the most likely conclusion … but then he was back to conspiracy theories. If the Phoenix had been hauling weapons, surely something, somewhere, would have come out about it; an exploratory mission never carried that much firepower.

There were no answers. There would never be answers. He should have learned to live with it by now. He had learned to live with it, even in the face of messages sent to him, year after year, by lonely and desperate people convinced the Corps knew more of the accident than they were telling. It had been years—decades—since he had given those theories any credence. And yet … there was something different about this message, sent anonymously, and the two that had arrived before it, spread over less than two weeks. He could not believe that it was coincidence that they had diverted to Volhynia, so close to the site of the disaster, at the same time as the messages started to arrive. Someone knew something—was trying to tell him something—and he could not work out what it was.

It unnerved him to realize how easy it would be for him to fall into that abyss all over again.

After his mother died, he worked toward joining the Corps because it was what she had wished for him. He had been in the field nearly two years, barely a lieutenant, before he had accepted she had been right: he belonged here. He had saved lives. He had ended wars and transported engineers to repair failing terraformers and weather converters. He had made food and medicine drops, carted researchers and humanitarian workers to worlds where people were struggling to make the unlivable into a home. He had made a difference, just as his mother had always told him he would. Despite that, though, all he ever saw at night—as he lay awake awaiting whatever meager portion of sleep would be granted to him—was her name among the dead.

The low chime of his office comm shook him out of his glum thoughts. A message ident flashed before his eyes: Adm. Josiah Herrod, Central Admiralty, Earth. Greg frowned. A real-time call from the Admiralty, and vid at that: they wouldn’t have allocated the bandwidth unless something was up. Out of habit he straightened, and felt a moment’s relief that he had been avoiding alcohol for the last two weeks. Off-duty or not, he didn’t want to talk to Herrod while he was drunk.

“Connect,” he told Galileo.

A moment later the admiral’s face appeared before him. He was seated at a desk similar to Greg’s, but instead of stars, the window behind him revealed a span of green grass and the wall of a blue-gray brick building. The light was dim, and Greg was not sure if it was early morning where Herrod was, or evening. “Admiral Herrod, sir,” he said formally, and saluted.

“At ease,” Herrod said automatically. Herrod was roughly twice Greg’s age, although his gray hair still retained much of its original dark brown. He had a broad face, a broad nose, and a perpetual frown, and Greg had the impression the man did not like him much. For Greg’s part he found Herrod too often stiff and uncompromising. Of course, this was not an unusual affliction for Corps brass who had been long out of the field, and it had been more than thirty years since Herrod had been off-planet. Still, he tolerated Greg’s idiosyncrasies, albeit with less grace than some of his peers; and if he sometimes lacked subtlety in his decision-making, he had been known, when presented with evidence, to change his mind. He was not the most nagging of Greg’s superior officers, and he had never been prone to vid comms across five sectors for no reason.

“What can I do for you, sir?” he asked.

Herrod’s hands were folded on the desk before him, and Greg saw his fingers clench. “What you can do for me, Captain,” Herrod said, “is explain to me what you’re doing loitering over Volhynia.”

Greg frowned again. Herrod would know; their presence here was official. “We took on Demeter’s cargo on Aleph Nine, sir,” he explained. “Volhynia was the last drop.”

“I’m aware of the cargo transfer,” Herrod snapped, and Greg thought perhaps this was not some kind of test after all. “What I want to know is why you’re still there.”

At that Greg became annoyed. It was easy for a man stationed on Earth to ask such a thing; he had no real idea of what life was like for a starship crew. But Herrod had spent time among the stars, albeit decades ago, and Greg was frustrated by how much the admiral seemed to have forgotten. “My people have been out for nearly half a year, Admiral, and they haven’t had a break since Aleph. You want to explain to me why you’re using a live vid signal to complain about my crew taking shore leave?”

“You want to explain to me why your crew is taking shore leave when we’re in the middle of a diplomatic incident?”

All of Greg’s irritation vanished. “I’m unaware of what you’re talking about, sir.”

“Your ship was briefed on approach, Captain Foster,” Herrod said severely. “If you’ve been ignoring Central’s reports—”

“No, sir,” Greg said. His gut felt cold and hard; he knew what had happened. He should have dealt with Will months ago. “There have been some … internal communication issues lately. If you could brief me directly, sir, that would probably be most efficient.”

Herrod looked away, and Greg could see him weighing whether or not he ought to waste time taking Greg to task. In the end he stuck with the problem at hand. “We’re on alert in the Fifth Sector,” he told Greg, “from Volhynia around the pulsar through the hot zone. The public story is that Demeter went in for repairs at Aleph because they were attacked by Syndicate raiders. In truth they were hit by PSI.”

Hit by PSI. Greg could not let that go unchallenged. “That can’t be right, sir. Someone miscommunicated something, or Captain MacBride is playing a joke that got out of hand. PSI’s not going to hit one of our ships. Above and beyond the fact that they’re on our side, we outgun them, sir, and not by a little bit. It’d be suicide for them to engage one of ours.” A cold fear struck him. “Are they claiming casualties, sir?”

“They’re not claiming anything,” Herrod told him. “They’re not talking to us.”

So it wasn’t a joke. Christ. Relations with PSI had always been light on dialogue, but it had been more than eighty years since any kind of live fire had occurred between Central and the nomadic group. Central maintained bureaucratic structures to facilitate aid and distribution to the colonies spread sparsely throughout the galaxy’s six mapped sectors; PSI preferred a more ad hoc style of providing assistance. Despite the humanitarian goals PSI shared with Central, their solutions were too different to facilitate camaraderie, but most Corps soldiers would never think of seeing a PSI ship as a threat. Something had set them off, and Herrod didn’t seem to know what it was. “What is Captain MacBride claiming?” Greg asked.

“MacBride reports that the PSI ship Penumbra approached them adjacent to the hot zone, and fired on them unprovoked.”

“For what? Their cargo?” If Central thought PSI had been after Demeter’s cargo, they would have made sure Greg was properly warned instead of simply loaning him twenty-five members of Demeter’s crew to handle the shipment.

Herrod was shaking his head. “MacBride said they took their shot and then retreated. No demands for cargo, no comms at all.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” Herrod agreed, “it doesn’t. Which brings me back to my original issue. We need you to be scouting for PSI activity in the area.”

Greg was already querying Galileo’s sensors. “We’re showing all four PSI ships outside of this vicinity,” he said. “Closest is Castelanna, but even she’s six hours out, and she’s not moving. They’re all stationary. Galileo, what’s the local time?”

“Local time is Dead Hour plus thirty-eight,” the ship said smoothly.

“What the hell’s Dead Hour?” Herrod asked irritably.

“Artificial power outage,” Greg explained. “The colony’s power grid isn’t reinforced to withstand the EMP from the pulsar, so they take the waypoints down for about an hour every night while they get hit. It doesn’t always save their equipment, but it keeps the pulse from traveling along their connections.”

Herrod shook his head. “They’ve got more money there than half the First Sector,” he grumbled. “Why the hell don’t they update their grid?”

“Tourism,” Greg replied, although he shared with Herrod an impatience at the planet’s odd decision. “When we come out of the pulse, sir, I’ll get my people on recon.” He hesitated. “You want me to pull them home, sir?”

Six months away from the First Sector, away from most of their families. Six weeks since they had had any time that was their own. They had barely nine hours before they were due back. He could recall them, and they would come, and they would do their best for him; but they had so little left. Most of them didn’t even really understand how close to the edge they were running.

Herrod appeared to be weighing the option. “Your discretion, Captain,” he said at last. “As long as PSI’s ships aren’t moving, we’ll stay off high alert. But I want you away from there in the morning, do you hear me? Find out what PSI is doing in the sector. Get them to talk to you if you can—but put it together. I want to know why they fired on Demeter, and I want to know if they’re going to do it again. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want a report in twelve hours. Directly to me, Captain.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And fix your communication problem,” Herrod finished. “I don’t want to hear again how a starship captain isn’t getting his orders.”

Damn, damn, damn. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It won’t happen again, sir.”

“You’re damn right it won’t. Herrod out.”

The vid vanished. “Galileo, let me know when Novanadyr comes out of the Dead Hour. And get me Commander Valentis.”

Galileo usually acknowledged his orders, but this time the ship simply opened the connection to Will Valentis without saying anything. He thought perhaps it knew he was angry.

Will could have taken the entire night for shore leave, but he had returned early. Greg had wondered about that. Six months ago he might have asked, might have encouraged his first officer to take more time to relax. Now he was just glad the man was back on board … and within reach, in case Greg found he had to strangle him. When the connection completed, Greg did not wait for Will to speak. “My office,” he said. “Now.” And he cut the line.

Will reported promptly. Will always reported promptly. Seven years they had served together, and Greg could not think of a single time his second-in-command had been late. He could not think of a time that Will had neglected to pass on relevant information, either, but he knew why it had happened now.

And he was entirely out of patience.

Will stood at attention, and Greg let him stand, stiff and rigid and staring straight ahead. “I just got off the line with Admiral Herrod,” he told Will. “You have something you need to tell me?”

“No, sir.”

Not an oversight, then. “The admiral seems to think I was supposed to know about a general alert in this sector,” he said, “because Demeter was hit by PSI. You know anything about that, Commander?”

Will blinked, and his eyes shifted briefly. “Sir, I—” He stopped and regrouped. “I’m sorry, Captain. I should have briefed you.”

Which was a reminder that it was Will who had been briefed on the situation, and not Greg. Will was enjoying his temporary power trip far too much. Greg let lie, for the moment, the fact that such vital information had not come directly to him. “You want to tell me why you didn’t?”

Will hesitated again. “Sir, you know there are things I can’t explain.”

And that was the crux of it. Six months earlier, when they had been on Earth, Will—perennially ambitious and stagnating as Greg’s first officer—had been tapped by Shadow Ops for a secret investigation. Greg had been notified of the fact of Will’s assignment to Central’s intelligence branch, but not the details. As a result, he had been required to give Will extensive leeway on comms and internal reporting, and in return Will provided him with a heavily redacted copy of his monthly report to S-O.

Greg had not been gracious about this. He should have been happy for his old friend, a man who had never been destined for command. In fact, intelligence seemed better suited to his talents, and might actually provide him with his long-sought avenue for advancement. But the secrecy had bothered Greg, despite having no concrete reason to mistrust Shadow Ops. Perhaps worse, Will enjoyed far too much leaving him out of the loop.

It was Bob Hastings, the ship’s senior medical officer and Greg’s oldest friend, who had made Greg stop and think. “He’s seven years older than you, Greg, and he’s spent all this time in your shadow,” Bob had pointed out. “Let him be good at this. Let him have something that isn’t a subset of you for once.”

So when they had arrived at Aleph Nine alongside the damaged Demeter and Will had asked him to have Galileo fulfill Demeter’s cargo obligations, he had agreed, despite the fact that it was prolonging their mission another three weeks. MacBride was providing twenty-five members of his crew to do the actual work of delivery, and it would take Galileo to a planet well-known for its recreational value.

The decision had made sense at the time. Now he wondered what had really been behind Will’s request.

“How about you redact what you need to redact,” he told Will, “and explain to me how you thought the sector being on alert was an important point to conceal.”

Will shifted uncomfortably. “The alert was relevant to Demeter, sir. You put me in charge of that mission.”

“I made you supervisor of her crew while they were on board.” Greg had no doubt the man understood the distinction. “Regardless, the alert is relevant to all ships in this sector. This is the safety of my crew we are talking about, and you chose to say nothing to me.”

“Sir, if I can explain—”

“No, Commander, you cannot.” He rounded his desk and stood before Will. Will was one of the only people on board as tall as Greg himself, but he kept his eyes on the opposite wall as Greg glared at him. “Out here, on my ship, I am the law. Not Shadow Ops. Not the Admiralty. Not you, Commander Valentis. This omission of yours, whatever excuse you concocted in your head, is feeling awfully close to mutiny for my taste. You think I’m going to be putting up with mutiny, Commander?”

Will swallowed. “Sir, I have no intention of being mutinous.”

“That’s encouraging to hear,” he said. “But your intentions are irrelevant. If I find out you’ve concealed anything else from me that affects the safety of this ship and this crew, I will write you up, regardless of any orders you feel you might have from S-O. Is that clear, Commander?”

Will reddened, a sure sign he was angry, but all he said was “Yes, sir.”

“You have anything else you need to be telling me, Commander Valentis?”

“No, sir. Nothing else.”

“Then you’re dismissed.”

Will snapped up straight and saluted, then turned and stalked out of the room. Not once had he met Greg’s eyes.

Only when Will was gone did Greg allow himself to react to what Admiral Herrod had told him. War with PSI. Son of a bitch. As long as he had been alive PSI had been a source of help and intelligence. Their people did not mingle with Central’s—they dealt more with colony governments and freighter captains than they did with Central Gov—but they had helped with everything from evacs to firefights, always on the side of Central and the colonies. The only groups they were actively hostile toward were the Syndicate tribes, and since the Syndicates often attacked PSI ships directly for their cargo, Greg could hardly blame them. PSI brought food to the starving, and equipment to planets losing their terraformers; they served as a refuge for homeless children, and often for adults who felt they had nowhere else to go.

But Central knew almost nothing of them. They had pieced together enough intelligence to make a guess at some of their patterns and rituals, but little more. For their part, PSI seemed singularly disinterested in engaging with Central. Why would they fire on Demeter? Had MacBride done something stupid?

Or was PSI changing their tactics?

His eyes returned to the window. Galileo flew between the pulsar and the planet, her shielding protecting her from the EMP. Her shuttles would be similarly protected, had they been allowed to take off during the blackout. Central should have insisted Volhynia upgrade their system years ago, but the government wasn’t inclined to push the colony to do anything. Central needed the bulk of the human population—most still living on Earth, or on the densely populated First Sector colonies—to believe prosperous worlds like Volhynia were the rule rather than the exception, and with widespread starvation in the Third Sector, they didn’t need Volhynia publicizing how little Central had to do with their success. Greg had spoken to the officials on the surface to arrange the cargo drop-off; they were smug bastards, and it had taken most of his energy to be polite to them. They seemed to think the dumb luck of their ancestors, who had managed to find a planet that was natively adapted to human life, somehow implied merit. Greg had little patience with such arrogance.

His father had always seen it differently. “A man who has never lost can’t understand what it is like to be without,” he said. Greg found that a weak excuse. He had always had food and clothing, diversions and transportation, friends and opportunities. He had led a charmed life. He still did. And every day, every time he inhaled, loss clawed at his throat and threatened to suffocate him. Nothing that Volhynia had was certain. Life could drop out from under you with no warning at all. Those officials were fools to believe they would never need Central’s goodwill.

With a silent apology to his people, Greg signaled the recall of the infantry down on the surface. He could not solve the Phoenix disaster—not now, maybe not ever—but he could find out what was going on with PSI. And maybe, if he could do it quickly enough, they could avert a war.

CHAPTER 4
Volhynia

Elena walked along Novanadyr’s wide streets, the bright morning light casting long shadows. She could not remember the last time she had stayed up all night for anything beyond her job. Back when she was in college, she thought. Before she enlisted. Back when it was easy to ignore her worries and be carefree, at least for a few hours.

The night would catch up with her, she knew. In this moment, however, she could not remember ever feeling so delightfully wide-awake.

Traffic picked up as she neared the spaceport. A few quiet solar mass-transit trams slid past along the center of the street, and she caught sight of some private shuttles speeding politely over the low rooftops. She realized, as numerous pedestrians smiled at her and wished her good morning, that she was wearing a wide grin. Well, so be it: for once she could be part of the crowd who had enjoyed shore leave.

They had made love as the sun rose, and then he had washed her hair, and found her an elastic she could use to tie it back. She caught him watching as she looped her hair into an efficient knot at the nape of her neck, and when she asked he had smiled. “I had never realized,” he told her, “how lovely a woman could be in a soldier’s uniform.”

It was hyperbole, she knew; he had grown up around women in uniform, and she was certain many of them were far more beautiful than she was. But somehow, in the moment, she believed him.

Despite the early hour the spaceport floor was crowded, numerous visiting shuttles lined up against the walls. Exodus One rested undisturbed where Elena had left her the night before. She began her preflight check, and caught herself humming; dancing was impractical when she was leaning down to look at the undercarriage, but every part of her felt full of music.

“Why are you so goddamned cheerful?” a voice growled behind her.

She turned and grinned at Ted. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” she greeted him. “How does the day find you?”

Ted Shimada was, at most times, a good-looking man, lean-muscled and hearty, but this morning he looked haggard. “There’s a remote possibility I had too much to drink last night.” She laughed aloud, and he winced. “Fuck, Lanie. Seriously.” He squinted at her. “You are cheerful, aren’t you? Who’d you spend the night under?”

“Some guy I met in a bar.”

“You? Picked up some spaceport cruiser? I don’t believe it.”

“He wasn’t a cruiser,” she told him. “He was PSI.”

That shocked most of the hangover right out of him. “Seriously? You picked up a pirate?”

“Well,” she said, a little alarmed at his response, “sort of. He’s retired.”

Ted’s expression froze, and his eyes took on a cunning look. “You picked up an old pirate.”

“Old my ass,” she declared, turning back to her task. “I didn’t sleep.”

“Yeah? How long?”

“Six hours, give or take.”

He shook his head in wonder. “Jessica is going to tell everyone on board, and the comms guys are going to stare at you like cats in heat for a month.”

She stopped and turned back to him. “Actually,” she said hesitantly, “I was thinking of telling Jess I hid in some dive hotel alone all night.”

“You think you can sell that?”

“Can’t I?”

“Let’s see.” He considered her. “Stop smiling so much.”

She drew her lips together and tried to look serious.

“Stand up straighter. Be military.”

She stood at attention.

“Now stop humming.”

She had not realized she was still doing it. Swallowing a grin, she complied.

He shrugged. “That’s not bad. Of course,” he added, as she went back to the preflight, “that big-ass hickey on your neck pretty much gives the game away.”

Elena put a hand to her throat. Sure enough, there was a tender spot under her left ear. She glared at Ted, who put up his hands in self-defense.

“Don’t yell at me,” he objected. “I didn’t bite you.”

The others trickled in as she worked, ticking their names off at the wall terminal. Fifteen minutes from departure she had twenty-one; not a bad showing from a roster of thirty. Most of the stragglers were from the Demeter crew; the few who had already arrived waited outside the shuttle for their friends, talking to each other in low voices and falling silent every time a Galileo soldier walked by. Elena did not understand them. Enthusiastic friendship was hardly required, but Demeter’s borrowed soldiers seemed intent on open hostility between the two crews. She should have asked the bay officer to assign them a dedicated shuttle, but she supposed that made her no better than they were.

Belatedly it occurred to her that Danny might be on this shuttle as well, and would hear how she had spent her evening. Well, she had made it clear to him when she turned down his invitation the day before that he had no claim on her any longer. He had thrown that away all on his own.

She had finished her check of the ship’s air seals and was turning to look for the dispatcher when she came face-to-face with Jessica, who had crept up silently behind her. Despite the fact that Jessica was likely just as hungover as Ted, she looked perfect: coppery hair tamed away from her face, expression bright-eyed and alert, the picture of a disciplined officer. Except that she was staring at the bruise on Elena’s neck, her expression cheerfully curious.

“So,” she asked, “did you find someone else?”

Elena shook her head, and saw her friend’s eyes widen slowly. “Seriously?” she said, nearly shrieking. “You fucked a pirate? Those guys are dangerous.” Jessica was looking at her friend with naked admiration. “You are out of your mind. So how was he?”

Elena thought of all the ways she could answer that. She thought of the night behind her, of how he had touched her, of how he had spoken to her. She searched until she found the right word.

“Thorough,” she said.

Jessica stomped with impatience. “Elena Marie Shaw, after all the years we’ve known each other, all you’re going to give me is ‘thorough’?”

Elena considered. “Extremely thorough,” she amended.

Departure time neared and they were still down four. It was Jessica who cleared up the discrepancy for her. “Someone said Foster pulled the infantry guys back early,” she said. “Didn’t say why.”

Elena frowned. Jessica seemed unconcerned, but Elena didn’t think Greg would have pulled any of them back early without a solid reason. If it had been an incipient emergency, he would have told all the senior officers, but she could not shake her unease. He would be awake when they got home; no matter how acidic he insisted on being, she would have to ask him.

Greg never took shore leave—captain’s privilege, he always said. Six months ago she would have cheerfully stayed home with him, enjoying his quiet company. As things stood, though, it had been easy for her to decide to leave. Their friendship had been strained for half a year, and the public argument they’d had two weeks ago had undone the last of her equanimity. If she had stayed behind, she would have run into him, and he would have goaded her into shouting at him again. Losing Danny should have hurt more than losing Greg, but she had so few true friends in her life. Lovers were easy; she felt she had left Danny behind already.

Greg was not so easily replaced.

She climbed onto the shuttle and settled into the pilot’s seat to steer them out of the main hangar. The morning sun blazed through the front window, and in deference to Ted’s quiet groan she engaged the polarizer. She angled them upward, keeping the incline gentle as they transitioned from the planet’s gravity to the ship’s artificial field. The sky darkened quickly as they rose through the clouds, and then the stars came out. She brought them around to the planet’s night side, and there, sleek and streamlined, graceful as a swan with wings outstretched, drifted the CCSS Galileo. Her ship. Her home.

Galileo had been state-of-the-art once, seven years ago, when she had first been christened. Even now, with all of the larger, faster ships that had been deployed since, the little craft was a gem, although Elena acknowledged she might not be entirely objective. Certainly the ship’s hull bore some battle scars, the sleek metallic surface discolored and battered here and there; but she could still outfight a vessel twice her size, and even with a slower top speed, she was faster off the mark than any ship that had been built since.

Demeter was both newer and larger, outfitted with cutting-edge tech out of Ellis Systems’ research branch, and Elena overheard her crew make disparaging comments about Galileo from time to time. She let it go, aware of where her own loyalties would lie if their positions were reversed. They were lucky they didn’t have to deal with Commander Jacobs, her old boss, who would have slapped them down publicly and succinctly, and with more than a few insults. Jake had always been impolitic and passionate, and in the year since his death she found she missed that part of him the most.

Only a year ago. Just a year. A year ago Jake, not Elena, had been chief of engineering, and she had been content working for him. A year ago she had had Danny to keep her warm, and Greg to keep her sane. Now she had none of them, all lost, one way or another. In recent months she had considered transferring off of Galileo, leaving behind all of the pain and alienation and starting over on another ship. But on this morning, flying home with a night’s worth of warm memories, that choice seemed ridiculous. How would her life look different if she went somewhere else? Leaving was an overreaction. It was giving up, and she had never been one to quit.

She hailed her ship. “Galileo, this is Exodus One requesting hangar access.”

“Exodus One, Galileo. Shuttle hangar seven. Welcome back, Lanie. You missing anybody?”

“Nobody but the infantry.”

“Well, you’re ten minutes late. Hurry up before you all miss breakfast.”

Elena glanced around the cabin. “I don’t think you’re going to have a lot of takers on the food.”

The comms officer cackled, and beside her, Ted groaned again. “Would you people please stop laughing?” he said plaintively.

Elena resisted the urge to pat him on the head, then transferred the shuttle’s control to Galileo and let the autopilot bring them home.

Trey took his time walking to work. It was nearly 6:30, and he was already an hour late. Katya would be irritable; but then, Katya was always irritable with him. It bothered her that his former profession was an asset to her restaurant. She still insisted he stay in the kitchen, invisible to the diners; but word had spread that Katya Gregorovich had a pirate for a chef, and curiosity had brought customers in droves. He liked to think they kept returning because of his cooking, but realistically he knew that most of them were just hoping to catch a glimpse of him. It gave him an odd sort of satisfaction, knowing that strangers thought better of him than his own blood.

He walked along the sidewalk past the restaurant window, and caught the shadow of someone moving inside. Katya would not open for another half hour, but she would have been there since 5:30, preparing. Trey thought back: at 5:30 he would have been washing the woman’s long, dark hair.

Since his return to Volhynia, he had been approached by men and women alike, attracted by strange misconceptions of the life he had led. This woman had not spoken to him as a PSI soldier; she had spoken as an equal, as a friend. As someone interested in him, and not the uniform he used to wear. He had actually felt glad, for the first time in months—perhaps years—to be what he was.

He began to hum again.

He stepped into the alley behind the restaurant. The kitchen was in the basement, and the separate entrance helped Katya preserve the illusion that he was some paid stranger, and not her family. He had always excused her treatment of him, even felt deserving of it. Today, though, he found himself tired of penance. Perhaps it was time he stopped apologizing for his choices. Perhaps it was past time to face the world as it was, the good with the bad.

The wind shifted, and he froze, still thirty meters from the entrance.

Not here. Not my home … When he was fifteen years old, Castelanna had been hit by a Syndicate raider. Trey, who had not yet seen battle, had run haphazardly into the middle of the fighting. By the time he arrived there was only one raider left alive, and before he had a chance to do anything Fyodor had used a pulse rifle to blast off the man’s shoulder. The invader had dropped, dead before he hit the floor. Trey had been hit with a spray of human blood and flesh, and it was days before he stopped smelling death.

Forty-two years later, he smelled it on the wind.

He crossed to the opposite side of the alley, his back against the wall. He could see, just beyond the basement entrance, a heap that might have been a man, and a dark shadow on the pavement that had nothing to do with the morning light. He inched closer, alert for movement. Nothing. The odor told him that whatever had happened had been over for hours.

When he got close enough to get a good look, he began cursing and did not stop. The man was young: thirty, perhaps thirty-five. In life he had been handsome, slender and fit, his yellow hair striking against his olive-gold skin. Now all trace of animation was gone. He stared straight up with pale brown eyes that were already sinking back into his head, long-congealed trickles of blood tracing from the slash across his throat onto the cement beneath him. His torso and abdomen were a mass of haphazard cuts and slashes—much of him was now indistinguishable from any other piece of meat—but even underneath the blood Trey recognized the same black and gray uniform he had sent the woman away in that morning.

The dead man was one of hers. And Trey, the outsider, was going to have to deal with it.

CHAPTER 5
Galileo

Greg watched the shuttle pull in, easing to the floor of the hangar without a bump. The autopilot, he supposed; even Elena, as obsessive as she was about flying, allowed Galileo to handle the artificial gravity transfer. Still, it was a testament to her flying skills that he could not tell by sight. He had watched her fly through atmospheric turbulence and antiaircraft fire, her hands steady and true, her mind always on the task before her, no matter what waited on the other side.

He was dreading the task before him, but at least it was action. Galileo had been fortunate enough to suffer few losses through the years, but in the Corps death was an inevitability. To Greg, losing one of his own crew always felt like a missed opportunity, some horrible mistake he had no way of correcting, and the futility of it enraged him. All he could do now was break the news to her compassionately, give her as soft a landing as he could. What waited for him on the other side was the search for answers, and the vain attempt to convince himself that justice would mean anything at all. Justice, he had found, was a flimsy illusion used to stave off anger, and anger always won in the end.

He kept his eyes on the ship as the hangar was sealed from space and oxygenated, and as the massive outer bulkhead closed. The shuttle settled to the floor and powered down, and the side door opened, disgorging a mix of his crew and Demeter’s, all lumbering with a lack of sleep. He saw Jessica Lockwood, as crisp and composed as she had been the night before, and Ted Shimada, looking slightly green. Elena came out last, her eyes scanning the shuttle’s hull, reflexively checking for damage.

Wherever she had been, she had changed her hair; it was knotted at her neck, more loosely than usual. When she left the night before it had been down, and she had fussed with it, self-conscious about the change. Now she seemed relaxed, almost liquid, as if movement were effortless; she shot a smile at the ground crew sergeant that nearly shattered Greg’s calculated detachment. She was not, he knew, a great beauty by any objective measure, but he was years past any kind of objectivity about her. He wished he could stop the universe and keep her frozen in this moment before he had to break her heart.

He wondered if it would have been easier or harder six months ago, before he had needed to retreat from her. She might have already been home on Galileo when he received the news, sitting with him in the cafeteria over an early breakfast. He would have had time to take care of her before he had to focus on anyone else; he could have held on to her for a while, steadied her until she could stand on her own. She would not have been isolated from him, unable to take comfort, unable to hear anything in his words but the failure that had let a man die.

Harder. Definitely harder.

“You could say hello, you know.”

He looked down at Lieutenant Lockwood. Unlike Elena, Jessica was a classic beauty, wide-eyed and round-faced, and she used it like a cudgel when she needed to; but what he always noticed first about her were her shrewd green eyes. He suspected few people bothered to lie to her. He could not start now.

She had seen it in his face already, and her expression sobered. “Is this about the recall, sir?”

Anger flared, and alongside it guilt. He should have recalled everyone, not just the infantry. He should have immediately pursued any officer who did not respond. He should have thrown Will Valentis in the brig for insubordination. It all would have been too late anyway. “No, Lieutenant,” he told her, keeping his voice neutral. She would hear the whole truth soon enough. “But if you could start gathering people in the pub, I’m going to have to make an announcement.”

She went white under her freckles, but he saw her straighten. “Yes, sir,” she said. She hesitated for a moment. “Do you need me to stay?”

She had followed his eyes and was watching Elena as she ran her hands along the shuttle’s exterior. “That’s all right, Jess,” he replied, more gently. “Just get the others together.”

She gave him a salute and disappeared out into the hallway. He closed his eyes for a moment, wishing for the last six months of his life back, then entered the hangar.

Elena looked up at his step, and she stiffened, all that liquid grace gone, waiting for him to reach her. He caught sight, as he drew closer, of a bruise on her neck—no, he realized, momentarily disconcerted, not a bruise. She had found company. It surprised him—it was unlike her to move on so quickly from a broken love affair. He wondered who it was; he had not noticed her showing an interest in anyone since her breakup with Danny Lancaster. Then again, he had always done his best not to look.

He stopped in front of her, and unlike Will Valentis she held his gaze, her dark eyes steady. She had never shown him any deference, even years ago when she was just another ensign under his command. And just like she had every time he spoke to her, in every conversation they had had for seven years, she saw it in his face before he made a sound. Her eyes widened with dread.

“Who is it?”

Of course she would know what had happened. There was a particular flavor to it, the death of one of their own. “I’m sorry, Elena,” he said. “It’s Danny. He’s been killed.”

He watched her face change, stage by stage: astonishment, doubt, denial, anger. Her eyes flashed, sharp and flinty. “Are you sure?”

“They have his ident. I’ll send Doctor Hastings down to verify, but there’s really no question.”

Her fingers convulsed against the ship. She turned away and then froze, as if she was trapped in a small space. “What happened? He drinks too much, all the time, was that it? Did he—”

Damn all colonies straight to hell. “He was murdered, Elena. I’m sorry.”

For a moment she did not react at all, and he thought he would have to repeat it. But then she said, “What?”

He looked away, reflexively running a hand over his short-cropped hair. “He was knifed. His comm was taken. For what it’s worth they’ve arrested a suspect—someone they’ve been watching for a while.” He left it at that; she did not need to know the rest. The rest he would take up with Will after the news of Lancaster was public and he did not have to rein in his emotions anymore.

“So you’re telling me he was mugged. That Danny was killed over money.” She pushed herself away from the shuttle, turning her back to him, her arms wrapped around herself. Her spine was stiff, but he could see how fast she was breathing. Rage and grief; he had been through it with her before, when Jake had been killed. When they had still been friends. “How long will they let us stay?” she asked, her voice low.

They meant Central. Elena knew the rules. “I haven’t spoken with them yet.” Mindful of Herrod’s order to depart that morning, he was waiting for more intel from the Novanadyr police department before he informed the admiral of his intent to remain. He thought he knew how Herrod would respond, but despite his hard line with Will, he was not beyond a little insubordination himself. They could do their part monitoring for PSI movement while they were in orbit, and if Herrod didn’t like it, he could haul his aging ass off of Earth and relieve Greg in person.

She shook her head. “We’ve already been out six months. What’s a few more days?”

He did not answer. She knew as well as he did what long tours did to soldiers, how events like one little night of shore leave became the difference between efficiency and anarchy. Greg believed he had the best crew in the fleet, but he knew a few more days might break them. A few more days might break her, too.

“Why did we come here, Greg?” she asked, in that same quiet voice.

It had been weeks, he realized with some surprise, since she had used his first name. Since their argument. “You know why,” he answered, confused. “Demeter needed repairs, and we took on her delivery. We—”

“I know what we did, Greg. I want to know why.” She turned to face him, and her rage hit him like a slap. “What was so critical about their cargo? Their timeline? Some two-bit trawler hauling for some overfed liquor merchants adds three weeks to our schedule, and you don’t even blink?”

“Elena—”

“No, let me guess,” she snapped. “You can’t tell me. Some need-to-know bullshit. Well Danny is dead, Greg, because of your need-to-know bullshit. Over money, for God’s sake, that paltry ten thousand that was all he ever managed to save, no matter how many times he won at cards, no matter how much—”

She stopped, and he saw the reality of it begin to sink in, and he wanted to throw away his rank and his detachment and his pointless self-involvement and put his arms around her, pooling her grief with his own. He had long since abdicated any right to offer her comfort, and for a moment his composure threatened to disintegrate in the face of a wave of self-loathing. Dammit, he should have had someone else tell her. He had forgotten, after all these months of avoiding her, how easily she could dismantle him.

He watched her expression close, her breathing steady, her posture straighten. Little by little she hid herself from him again, tucking away all her rage and bitterness.

“Thank you for telling me, Captain,” she said calmly.

This was worse, he thought: this deliberate separation, this rejection of anything he might offer her. “Elena, if you need anything—”

“Don’t.” The word was a choked whisper.

He nodded. “I’ll be informing the rest of the crew in a few minutes. Just so you know.”

She looked away from him, and he turned back to the door, grasping at the shards of his anger. He needed it back. His rage helped him to forget how entirely pointless his presence was, how useless he was to her, to his crew, to the dead man.

There would be justice, and it would make no difference.

He shook off self-pity and left the hangar to tell his crew their comrade was dead.

He spoke to them in the only area large enough to hold the entire crew: the massive VIP conference room, years ago repurposed as the ship’s pub. He kept it brief and factual, talking about justice and love and losing one of their own, and he saw in some faces, at least, that it helped. They believed in him, and they believed he would find justice for Danny. After all, he was the man who made things happen, who circumvented regs and logic and the goddamned laws of physics when it suited him. His reputation, as exaggerated as it was, worked in his favor. When he finished they were shocked and grieved, but reassured that he would get to the bottom of it all.

When Greg turned to Will at the close of his speech, his first officer looked pallid and shaken, unable to hide his shock. Will had played some poker with Danny—Danny excelled at losing money, and was popular at the gambling table—but Greg had not thought they were so close.

It was a rare crack in Will’s armor, and Greg thought he could use it.

“With me,” he said stiffly, and walked out, trusting Will would follow him. There were too many people still milling about to risk having this discussion in public.

Will trailed into Greg’s office after him and sat in his usual chair without asking. Greg leaned against the edge of the desk, arms crossed. Will met Greg’s eyes, already defensive.

“I hate coincidence, Will,” Greg told him.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ll spell it out, then,” he said, still calm. “One of my men gets killed in the middle of a cargo mission you requested, right around the time I get my ass handed to me because you decide Shadow Ops has somehow given you the authority to keep me out of the loop on a general alert. Which coincidentally involves some fairy story MacBride is telling about being attacked by PSI. And here’s the most interesting thing about that. Do you know who Novanadyr is holding for Lancaster’s murder? Some PSI expat who just settled there. Who somehow manages to kill a trained fighter with an old-fashioned, low-tech blade.” Greg leaned forward, looming over Will’s chair. “Lancaster was nearly decapitated, did you know that? I didn’t tell the crew, but I’ve got that picture in my head. A thirty-five-year-old man, with a sister and four nieces, bleeding out in seven seconds on an alien planet.”

He had not raised his voice, but Will had flinched. “So let me reiterate, Commander Valentis: I hate coincidence. Explain to me why I shouldn’t shut down your investigation right now and tear up the concrete on that rock down there until I find out what happened.”

“You don’t have the authority,” Will said, his voice dry.

So much for sympathy. “We are ten days away from the closest Central hub, Commander,” he returned. “Five months away from Earth, if we take a straight shot. I can do whatever the fuck I want out here, and every soldier on this ship will back me up.” He leaned back. “Try again.”

Will swallowed, and looked away. “I don’t believe Lancaster’s death is related to my work, sir,” he said.

Greg stood up and circled behind his desk, parsing that. “Why not?”

“Sir, I—dammit, Captain, I’m under orders here. From people who outrank you.” He sounded desperate. “I can’t just give you this investigation. It’d be my career.”

“It always comes back to your career, doesn’t it, Will? It’s never about the crew, or even the mission. It’s always what’s in it for you.”

Will had reddened. “That’s not fair, Captain. What I’m doing for S-O is important.”

“Yes,” Greg said icily. “I’m sure it is. So important you can’t tell a living soul, so now we’ve got a dead one.”

“You’re not putting Lancaster’s death on me.”

“Then tell me who to put it on, Will.”

Will exploded. “I’ve told you! I—” He looked away, then got to his feet, agitated, running his fingers through his short black hair. He was graying here and there; Greg had not noticed before. “Lancaster spoke a lot with the Demeter crew, yes.” He began to pace. “You know what he was like; he wanted everyone to get along, and most of our crew hasn’t exactly welcomed them with open arms.”

Greg thought that went both ways, but he let it pass. “Would they have discussed anything proprietary with him?”

Will had stopped at Greg’s window and was looking down at the planet. “They shouldn’t know anything proprietary,” he said at last.

That had cost him, and Greg tried to remind himself to appreciate that. “But if they did,” he pressed, “would they have told Lancaster?”

“I won’t speculate.” Will’s expression had closed, and Greg thought that small admission was the only thing he was going to get.

Greg allowed himself to rub his eyes; there was no point in posturing anymore. Will had told him all he needed to know about how deeply Demeter was involved in all of this. Any further investigation was going to have to be his own. The problem was how to ensure he could investigate unencumbered. He did not want to make an enemy out of Will, not in the middle of a crisis. It had crossed his mind, however, that they might be beyond that point.

“Here’s what’s going to happen, Commander.” He spoke calmly, wanting Will to understand that his decision was not made in a temper. “We’re going to stay here as long as it takes to get Lancaster’s death resolved. That means more than just Novanadyr charging his killer; it means we find out why he did it.”

“Central won’t allow that.”

“You let me worry about Central.” There were delaying tactics he could use, everything from semantic arguments to outright lies. If he achieved his ends, he thought the Admiralty would forgive him, or at least not come down on him too hard. “But in the meantime … I’m shutting you down, Commander. Your investigation stops right now. S-O gets nothing until we find out what happened to Lancaster.”

“You can’t do that, Captain!” Will turned on Greg, shouting into his face. “They are not just my superior officers. They are yours as well, and this will not be tolerated!”

Greg held on to his temper. “Maybe not,” he said evenly, “but that’s on me, Will. I’m revoking your external comm privileges, effective immediately.”

And to his astonishment, Will laughed. “They’ll bust you for this,” he said, with certainty.

“Maybe.” Greg wondered exactly who Will’s allies were. “But if they do, it’ll be after we get answers for Danny Lancaster.”

CHAPTER 6

Jessica sat before a cup of bitter coffee, surrounded by her silent and somber friends. After the captain’s speech, about half of them had stayed in the pub: more than a hundred people, including the Demeter crew members. They might be self-satisfied jackasses, but their distress seemed genuine. Danny had spent a lot of time talking to them, even Lieutenant Commander Limonov, widely known to be half-mad. Danny had listened to the man’s ravings, all his tin-foil-hat theories of aliens and government conspiracies, with what had always seemed to be genuine interest. Now Limonov sat with his crewmates, scowling miserably into a clear glass of dark liquid, and Jessica reflected that everyone needed someone to listen once in a while.

“Excuse me.”

Along with the rest of the table, Jessica looked up. Captain Foster stood over them, his demeanor grave and military, unrecognizable from the hollow-eyed, resigned man she had left in the hangar.

Damn, he’s a good actor.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I need to borrow Lieutenant Lockwood for a moment.”

The others murmured excuses and one by one removed themselves from the table. Jessica wondered at that; surely she and the captain should have been the ones to leave. But it was deference to him, she realized: no matter how big a jerk he was to Elena, no matter what sorts of rumors persisted in the hallways, Captain Foster’s crew adored him. She adored him a little herself, which irritated her sometimes; she did not like to think she was subject to military psychology. But she had to admit, no matter how well she got to know him, no matter what stupid mistakes she saw him make, she would always be willing to walk into death for him.

He waited for the others to leave, then dropped into a chair next to her. He was a good-looking fellow, her captain. A bit on the thin side, sure; but he had a handsome, chiseled face just this side of perfection, well-muscled arms, and lovely, long-fingered hands that gestured gracefully when he was speaking. And his eyes, of course. Those eyes, light gray and black, strange zebra-stripe eyes, laser-bright against his dark skin. She had thought, when she met him, that they were a cosmetic affectation. It had not taken her long before she realized affectations were alien to him. He dealt purely in somber reality, although she caught flashes, sometimes, of lightheartedness. As she looked at him now, he seemed weary and defeated, and she wondered how much was Danny, and how much was Elena.

Jessica did not understand it at all. For months Elena had seemed to recognize, on some level, that Foster needed to keep away from her, and had tried to give him space; and then everything had blown up a few weeks ago in the pub. Jessica did not believe he had really meant the things he had said, but she knew how Elena held a grudge. He was going to be a long time rebuilding that bridge, if he could do it at all, and she did not think having to break the news of Danny’s death had eased any tension.

“Did Commander Valentis say anything useful?” she asked him.

She had seen the look on his face when he had left with Valentis. Five months ago Foster had handed her the first of Commander Valentis’s reports to Shadow Ops, with a carefully worded request for her to see what she could make of the parts that had been redacted. Without explicit authorization to decrypt, she had simply documented the algorithms, and how long it might take a competent hacker to break them.

When he had shown up with the next report, she had asked why he was confiding in her, and not Commander Broadmoor, his security head. “Because you’re more loyal to me than to the rules,” he had told her.

She had never been sure what to make of that, but she couldn’t disagree.

He unfolded his long legs under the table and crossed them at the ankles. “Not so you’d notice,” he replied. “Double-talk about Lancaster and the Demeter crew, and how it’s all just a coincidence it happened on this cargo drop.”

“You believe him?”

To her surprise, he paused. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

On top of everything else, she found herself hit with a wave of unease. “You think his story is credible.”

“I think,” Foster said slowly, “that ‘credible’ and ‘true’ are not the same thing.” He looked over at her, and she saw a familiar sharpness in his eyes. “How comfortable would you be digging into the life of a dead man?”

The breach of privacy should have horrified her, but it was action, and it might actually prove useful. “Parameters, sir?” she asked.

“No parameters, Lieutenant. I want everything.”

“What if I run into something locked?”

“We’ll clear it after the fact.”

She held his gaze for a moment. “Locked” could mean tagged as private, or it could mean classified and sealed under threat of court-martial. She wondered briefly if her captain was testing her. Greg Foster got creative with regulations sometimes—she had heard him interpret orders with impressive semantic gymnastics—but there were lines he just didn’t cross. It occurred to her to ask him if he understood what he was suggesting. She had learned over the years, though, that he missed almost nothing. He knew exactly what he was asking her to do, and how good she would have to be to do it.

This was more than circumventing regulations. This was working around the Admiralty, around Shadow Ops, around Central Gov itself. Regardless of her intentions, she could be charged with treason. There was something bigger happening, something he had not told her yet—and he didn’t trust his own command chain to handle it. That he trusted her was both flattering and daunting, and she had no intention of letting him down.

“She spent the night with someone, didn’t she?”

It took her a moment to recognize the change of subject, and she grew immediately wary. Like every practical, pragmatic man, he had a blind spot, and his had been the same as long as she had known him. “Why do you ask?”

She knew he had heard her bristle. He always heard it when she bristled. “This guy—do you think they’re at a point where she’d lean on him? No matter what she thinks she needs, at some point being alone is not going to work.”

Oh, hell, he thought it was someone on board. “It wasn’t one of ours, sir,” she told him. “He was a stranger. Some guy she met at the bar.”

“That doesn’t sound like her.”

“You think I’m making it up?”

“Of course not. I just—you know her as well as I do. You’re telling me you’re not surprised?”

She thought back. She had been pleasantly tipsy when Elena had left the group, but she remembered the pirate, how he had leaned toward her friend and smiled, how Elena had laughed, her whole body relaxing for the first time all night. “Not with this guy,” she told him. “He was tall, dark, and handsome, and looked like he’d had his nose broken a half-dozen times and didn’t care about getting it fixed. He even wore the uniform, which seemed a little weird at a local pub, but it looked good on him.”

“Uniform? You said he wasn’t one of ours.”

Oops. “No, sir. He was PSI.”

Foster became utterly still, and for one disconcerting moment she could not read his expression at all. “Are you certain of that, Lieutenant?”

All of her alarm bells were going off. “Certain? No. He was wearing all black, and he had his hair pulled back in a braid, like they do. Of course, he was friendly, at least with her, so maybe he was just playing the part.” Jessica thought of her friend—tall, dark, and lovely—and did not wonder that anyone, even a PSI soldier, would warm to her. “What is it about PSI, sir?”

“We don’t know anything about them,” he tried. “We don’t know why this man was there. None of our intelligence suggests they do shore leave like we do. What could he want on Volhynia, then?”

She took in the anxiety on his face. She was beginning to think this wasn’t about jealousy after all. “Don’t bullshit me, sir. I know you. You don’t get paranoid about PSI. Hell, you’re not shy about working with them when we need them.”

“That’s in the Fourth Sector. I don’t know them here.”

“But they’re on our side, sir. Aren’t they?”

He was silent for a long time, and her spine began to tingle again. PSI was an acronym pulled from a dead language, which roughly translated meant freedom, truth, intellect. In her experience, they lived up to the sentiment. Like many people who had grown up on a world with limited resources, she viewed PSI as a positive force, sometimes heroic. PSI supply drops had kept her warm and properly fed as a child. It had never occurred to her before that she knew nothing of them at all.

“It’s more than just Danny,” she said quietly, “isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you can’t tell me.”

“No.”

She took a moment to silently curse rank and regulations, then nodded. “I’ll get on Danny’s records, sir,” she said formally. There was little she could do for Danny, but she could do this.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. And as soon as I can—” He was interrupted by a chime from his comm. “Yes?”

Jessica heard nothing; he had it set to private audio, the patch behind his ear flashing dimly as he listened, but by his lack of response she knew the message was not from a person, but from Galileo herself. She saw the color drain from his face, and his eyes grew hard and determined. Before he was finished listening, he was on his feet. She stood as well, and wished she hadn’t; the difference in their heights seemed less dramatic when she was sitting down. “Sir?” she asked.

“They’ve released the killer’s name,” he told her tersely. “I need to talk to the chief.”

CHAPTER 7

Elena sat on the floor between her bed and the window, staring out at the stars. She could so easily imagine being out there in the icy darkness, weightless, airless, soundless. Sometimes as she watched she held her breath; but she could still hear her heartbeat, and under that the soft, constant thrum of Galileo’s systems. The ship made a different sound when they were in the FTL field at speed, but even at rest it sang, gentle as a lullaby. That song always made Elena think of Jake, and for a long time it had left her sad; but in recent months, despite her battles with Greg, it had made her feel strong, and less alone. Even after she broke up with Danny. Especially after.

She tried to feel grief, but all of her rage, all of the intensity that should have been about Danny was focused on Greg. Why had he brought them here? He hated tourist planets. She had wondered about his mother, about being close to the wormhole and the site of the Phoenix accident; but the man she knew wouldn’t have kept tired troops out another three solid weeks just to get three billion kilometers away from where a starship had been blown to pieces twenty-five years ago. There was something else happening; she had seen it in him. Only there was no way for her to ask him, this man who had become a stranger to her, what was really going on.

The anger was childish and pointless. She was stupid. And more than anything, she wished for the Greg she had known six months ago, who would have sat here, as he had after Jake died, asking nothing of her, just staring with her out at the stars.

She climbed to her feet, turning her back to the window. “Galileo, have you got a Novanadyr news feed?”

“Twelve feeds are available, six on the stream.”

That surprised her; stream feeds usually meant tabloid journalism, and Volhynia didn’t seem like the kind of place that would encourage such a thing. “Find me one with a decent news reputation.”

“Standard or local dialect?”

The local language, like Standard and most of those spoken in the Fourth and Fifth Sectors, was a derivative of ancient Russian. Elena knew enough to get by, but she did not want to risk losing the subtleties. “Standard,” she said.

The vid flared to life in the air half a meter before her eyes. She saw a low building made of yellow sanded brick lit by the planet’s unfamiliar, anemic sunshine, an overlay identifying it as the police station. For a moment she thought the picture was static, but occasionally the small shrubs planted by the foundation stirred in the wind, and eventually a bland, accentless voice-over explained that they were waiting for a promised update from Yigor Stoya, the chief of police.

“Is this all they’re showing?” she asked, after several minutes without change.

“A summary of earlier updates to this story is available,” Galileo told her.

Elena dropped into one of the chairs that sat at her little table by the door. “Let’s have that, then.”

A selection of news clips began playing: the initial report of the murder, identifying him only as a tourist; some reaction shots from a selection of local merchants; a brief statement from a sturdy, barrel-chested man in his early forties identified as Chief Stoya. He had iron-gray hair over weary eyes set in pale skin, and she was almost certain he was an off-worlder. There was something in how he moved that set him apart from the natives she had seen, something familiar that she could not place. The set of his mouth gave him a look of ruthlessness, and she wondered if that ruthlessness applied to his pursuit of justice.

She opted to watch the full vid of the arrest of the suspect. Oddly, he had been at the station at the time, reporting finding the body. What a strange way of trying to divert suspicion, she thought; and then she watched as the police hustled the man, in old-fashioned handcuffs, through the low yellow building’s open front entrance.

And her blood went cold.

His hair was loose, hanging over his face; but she could see one bruised, half-shut eye, and his lip was split in several places. Blood had dripped onto his clothes: white and pristine that morning, she remembered. His knuckles were clean; he had not fought back. She supposed, knowing something of the local laws, that would have been close to suicide. He glowered at the cameras, his dark eyes irate, but she caught a resignation in them as well. A man like him, PSI for most of his life, would not be surprised to find himself railroaded by colony law.

He was marched forward far enough for the news crews to get a good look at him, and then he was bundled around to the back of the building and out of sight. The shot switched, this time to a different police officer, identified as Lieutenant Commander Janek Luvidovich, investigator in charge. He spoke with intelligence and deliberation, diverting the press with articulate non-answers … and had it not been for the edges of a hangover tugging at the corners of his eyes, she might not have recognized him as the incoherent man who had grabbed her arm the night before.

She swore, leaping to her feet. “Galileo, how old is that clip?”

“Two hours sixteen minutes.”

Two hours. God. They would have been beating him again, almost certainly. They would want a confession, and he had nothing to confess. “Is there an ident on the suspect?”

Galileo flashed a name, and she froze. “Truly?” she said faintly.

“Suspect has confirmed to police.”

She swept her hand through the video and hurried out of her room, heading back in the direction of the pub. “Where’s the captain?”

“Captain Foster is in the atrium.”

She emerged from the narrow corridor that housed her quarters into the bright, wide atrium area, the center of the ship. Six levels high and fifty meters wide, the space was lit with full-spectrum mid-morning light, making the day on Volhynia look like a winter afternoon. With its gardens full of vegetable plants and fruit orchards, the atrium had always provided her with enough of a sense of open space to keep her happy; in the center of it, she could deceive herself that it was a park on a colony somewhere, and not the central hub of a starship.

Elena scanned the paths before her, oblivious to the beauty she passed. She did not have to search long. He was walking toward her, his stride businesslike, and she had the impression that he had been coming to find her.

“Captain,” she said as they approached each other, “I need to talk to you.”

“I need to talk to you, too, Chief.”

He stopped, glaring at her, and she felt a flash of exasperation. So much for their recent argument diffusing his pent-up anger. He was annoyed with her again, for God only knew what, and she did not have time to tiptoe around his temper. “Captain, I’ve got to go back down.”

“The hell you do.” She could not tell if he was more incredulous or annoyed.

Why does he never just listen? Ignoring his outburst, she said, “I need a shuttle, and I need to get down there right now, because they’ve been beating him up already, sir, and it’s only going to get worse.”

“You are not going anywhere until you tell me about this PSI officer you spent the night with!”

There were not a lot of people in the atrium: half a dozen that she could see, huddled in groups, hanging on to each other as they processed the shock of Danny’s death. Greg’s outburst had secured the attention of all of them.

She didn’t care. “I’m trying to tell you, sir. They’ve got the wrong man, and that investigator isn’t going to let him go, and I have to get down there and untangle it or they’re not going to do a goddamned thing to find Danny’s killer.”

“They’ve got his killer. And I want you to tell me what the hell PSI is doing dropping people on Volhynia.”

She replayed that in her head, and could not make it comprehensible. “What are you talking about?”

“That man you were with last night? I want to know who he was, and what he was doing there, and how in the hell Treiko Tsvetomir Zajec ended up on Volhynia murdering my crewman.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” She wanted to shake him. “He didn’t, Greg. He couldn’t have. He was with me when Danny died, and for hours afterward. What the hell are you talking about?”

Slowly his eyes widened, some of his anger and frustration dissipating. “You’re telling me the suspect—Captain Zajec—that’s the PSI officer you spent the night with?”

“What did you think?” she asked irritably. “That there were hordes of them down there, and one of them diverted me while the others hunted down Danny?”

He was staring at her, but she knew the look. That was exactly what he had been thinking. “Come sit down,” he said at last, and took a step toward a bench next to the herb garden.

Now you want to keep this private? “We do not have time.” But she followed him, and she saw the others turn away, losing interest in the argument.

When she sat, he turned toward her. “Tell me.”

“That man they’ve arrested. Treiko Zajec. He’s the man I was with last night. And unless they completely bollixed up the time of death, he could not have murdered Danny.”

“You’re sure of this.”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t step out, comm someone else? What about while you were sleeping?”

“We didn’t sleep.” He looked away, and she felt like shaking him again. “Greg, the ident. Are we really sure it’s him?”

“He’s the right age,” he said, “and he’s apparently known to the local PD.” He rubbed his eyes, and for a moment she glimpsed his extreme fatigue. She wondered if he had commed Danny’s sister yet. “Elena, what the hell is a PSI captain doing in a place like Novanadyr?”

The Fifth Sector was not their usual patrol. Galileo took the Fourth Sector, and was familiar with the PSI ships that shared their territory. Greg had met all of the officers, had even befriended a few of them; Elena knew most of their names. But even outside of the Fifth Sector, everyone in the Corps knew the names of its PSI captains: Piotr Adnovski, Valeria Solomonoff, Aleksandra Venkaya, and Treiko Zajec.

The dark-eyed chef. Her lover.

“He’s retired,” she told Greg. “He said about six months.”

“Why Volhynia?”

“He was born there.”

“Why’d he leave?”

She thought of the sister who did not want to acknowledge him. “He didn’t say. Greg, why does it matter?” She shifted, wanting to run to the hangar and get moving. “He didn’t kill Danny, and I need to make a statement, or they’ll hang it around his neck.”

“I’ve talked to the cops,” he said. “Stoya, and that kid they’ve got in charge of it. They’re not stupid. You really think they’re just going to hang it on an innocent man?”

“That kid they’ve got in charge of it is part of the problem,” she said.

His face grew wary. “Why?”

She told him.

“Oh, that’s fucking marvelous,” he snapped. “The chief fucking investigator, knocked on his ass by the most notorious pirate in the sector, over you.”

“So you see why I need to make a statement.”

He shook his head. “Elena, you can’t go back there. What do you think they’re going to say when they find out you and Danny were lovers? You really think that’s going to help the guy?”

“What are they going to do, call me a liar? With Central backing me up?” He just looked at her, and after a moment her stomach dropped. “Oh,” she said.

“You go down there, you’re just going to make it worse.”

“You’re telling me Central doesn’t care who killed Danny?”

“It’s not about that.”

His expression had closed again, and she clenched her teeth. God, this secrecy is bullshit. “Greg,” she asked him, “what’s going on?”

“You know the political situation with Volhynia.”

Everyone knew the political situation here. Volhynia: the planet that didn’t require terraformers, had a healthy, growing population, was a tourist center, and a scientific hub. Central needed people to believe that Volhynia was not the exception: that humanity was able to thrive out here, that they weren’t fighting a losing battle against score after score of hostile environments.

But she could not believe Central would let the murder of one of their own go unpunished. “I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. “It’s something else, Greg, something that you’re trying not to tell me.” I’m going back with or without your permission, she told him silently, so give me something to work with here.

He was staring at her intently, eyes serious, evaluating her. He frightened some people when he was like this, but she knew better. He was trying to understand, trying to read her mind, trying to figure out how much he really needed to say. Before, he would not have hesitated; he would have known he could trust her. In all fairness, before, she would have trusted his advice without needing to know why he gave it, too.

Now, she needed to know. After a moment he looked away. “This is command-level intel, Elena,” he said.

“Who the hell am I going to tell?”

He shot her a look. “MacBride is reporting that Demeter was hit by PSI.”

She thought for a moment he was joking. “Bullshit,” she said.

“He is reporting,” he told her, “that they approached the PSI ship Penumbra outside the Phoenix hot zone, and when they asked what the ship was doing there, they were fired upon.”

“Penumbra.” She had a vague memory of having heard the name. “That wasn’t Captain Zajec’s ship.”

Greg shook his head. “Solomonoff’s.”

“She doesn’t have the reputation for being crazy.”

“None of them do.”

“But Central is still letting MacBride file this work of fiction.”

His lips tightened. “He’s an experienced Corps captain, Elena, and a die-hard patriot. And why in the hell would Niall MacBride make up a story that makes him sound like a coward?”

True enough … MacBride was all ego and bravado, but he did his job, and he did not have a reputation for running away. “So Central thinks something is up with PSI.”

“Central is watching very carefully right now.”

“So carefully they will let Volhynia convict a man for murder who had nothing to do with it.”

His face took on a careful expression. “Kind of a coincidence,” he said, “that of all the people in that bar, Zajec talked to you.”

Bastard, she thought, but something had occurred to her. “Listen—I’ll allow for the possibility that it wasn’t my wit and charm that made him take me home.” She hated saying it. She certainly did not believe it—not after last night. “But think about this: let’s suppose, for a moment, that PSI has some secret scheme that involves making MacBride look chickenshit, and picking off our mid-level infantry grunts one at a time. Does Central really want Captain Zajec in the hands of the authorities on Volhynia? Where by the end of the day they’ll have him locked up in some room so far belowground he’ll never see sunlight again? It makes no sense, does it?”

Please, she thought at Greg. Please understand what I’m saying.

He was staring away from her, his eyes aimed at the herb garden, seeing nothing. “Why do I feel like you’d say anything to get me to agree to this?”

“Because I’m right,” she told him, “and you know it.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Central won’t want him locked up on Volhynia,” he said, “but they’re not going to want him running around free, either.”

That was an angle she had not thought of. “But—”

“You can’t have it both ways, Elena. You tell me he’s useful? I agree. That means we use him.”

“He’s retired, for God’s sake,” she snapped. “He doesn’t know what happened to Demeter.”

“And you know this how?” He opened his eyes and stared at her, his gaze hard. “This isn’t some guy you picked up at a school dance. This is a PSI captain who runs into you while we are on alert. Central isn’t going to buy ‘he’s retired.’”

“And you don’t, either, do you?” She felt anger taking over again. “It’s so easy for you to believe that he could have fooled me, that I could have turned a blind eye to some fucking conspiracy.”

“And it’s so easy for you to dismiss the possibility because the guy’s got some personal charm.” Before she could object, he added, “Will you fucking think for a second? You want to believe this guy? Fine. But think about how it looks from the outside, to people who’ve never met him. We need to talk to him, Elena. This isn’t about tact or diplomacy, this is about people shooting at each other.”

“So you want me to arrest him.”

“I want you to do what you have to do to get him up here,” he told her. “Appeal to his better nature. I’m sure he doesn’t want war any more than we do.”

And yet we’re the ones talking about taking prisoners. She shook her head. “I’ll get him released, Greg. But if you want him up here, either he comes willingly or you send someone else down to grab him. I won’t do it.”

She saw his jaw set and his fists clench, and she wondered if he would risk giving her a direct order.

She wondered what she would say to him if he did.

At last he nodded, and she felt a flood of relief. “You go down there,” he told her, “you give your statement, you get him out. And you do your damnedest to convince him Galileo is the safest place he could be right now. Whether he says yes or no … you don’t piss around down there, Chief. You deal with the immediate situation, and you haul ass back here. Clear?”

“Clear, sir.”

“And I’m sending Bob down with you.”

The relief vanished. “Doctor Hastings? Why?”

“I want him to validate their postmortem results,” he told her. “And it’s a plausible excuse to have someone down there keeping an eye on you. You stay with him, you understand? Have him treat Zajec’s injuries, if it makes you feel better, but do not go anywhere without him.”

“Fine,” she agreed. “But he’s got five minutes to make it to the hangar, or I leave without him.” She turned and started to walk away.

“Elena.”

She stopped.

“This isn’t going to change what happened.”

Nothing would change what happened. Danny was dead, and that was reality, and when all of this was untangled she would have to sit down and have a good hard look at that fact. When Jake had died she had spent days cleaning up the engine room, clearing burnt debris left over from the blast, repairing what she could and writing up invoices for the parts that needed replacing. It had not brought Jake back, but it had needed doing, and when his loss finally hit her she had been able to surrender to grief without having to worry about duty.

She would do her duty for Danny as well, and see his killer come to justice.

“Five minutes,” she repeated, and headed for the hangar.

CHAPTER 8
Volhynia

I forget,” Doctor Hastings said as they glided back down toward the planet, “do you deal with this sort of thing head-on, or are you the type to swallow your feelings?”

“You know exactly what type I am,” she told him. Bob, as it happened, was one of the few people who would know for certain.

“You’ve been swallowing a lot lately.”

Not now, she thought, shoving a bubble of grief back down her throat. “Maybe I wouldn’t have to if my friends weren’t being such assholes.”

“Did it ever occur to you that he’s even worse at dealing with loss than you are?”

“Did it ever occur to you that that’s no excuse for his behavior?”

“Didn’t say it was an excuse.” Bob always spoke mildly, as if nothing he ever said was of any import. “I’m just suggesting that when someone who copes poorly makes the mistake of getting intoxicated in public, he’s not going to handle it well.”

Annoyance began to blunt grief, and she clung to the topic. “He’s a grown man,” she said. “He has a tantrum, and I’m supposed to shrug it off and forgive him?”

“It’s really that bad between you?”

“You were there,” she reminded him. “What do you think?”

Everyone had been there. Bob had been at the bar right next to her, talking with Emily Broadmoor until Greg’s yelling drew their attention. She had retorted, for all the good it did—there was no real comeback to what he had said. His outburst had crossed a line she had thought long crossed. He had hurt her, when she had thought there was no more room for hurt in her life. At least she wasn’t spending any more time trying to figure out how to forgive him.

Bob had known Greg for years; knew his father, his sister, his wife; had known his mother before she died. Duty notwithstanding, Elena knew where his loyalties lay.

“If I asked you, as a personal favor, not to close the door on him,” Bob asked, “would you do it?”

For a moment she thought quite seriously of screaming at him. Instead she bit her tongue, and took a mental step back. Underneath her irritation, her guilt, her grief, there was bone-deep exhaustion. She had not slept, she had not eaten, she had too much left to do, and none of that was the fault of the physician. “I didn’t close anything,” she said, with more civility than she felt. “But he sure as hell did.”

Novanadyr’s traffic control guided them through the atmosphere and onto the spaceport’s tarmac, keeping them hovering until they were waved into the hangar. The deck coordinator assigned them a spot right by the back door. She appreciated the placement—she always preferred to be close to the exit, even on a developed colony—but she suspected they were simply hoping that Central wouldn’t leave their representatives on the surface for long.

They took one of the public trams to the police station. Elena was aware of stares. She kept her face expressionless and her eyes forward; both of her hands gripped the railing, but she was conscious of her handgun at her hip. Next to her Bob leaned into the wind, a half smile on his face. At one point he turned to a woman standing behind them and said hello. The woman looked startled and moved away; Bob gave a low chuckle.

“We need to be efficient,” she told Bob as the tram slowed in front of the station. “Once we walk in there, the press will descend like vultures.” She hopped off, Bob at her heels.

“A proper postmortem is going to take me at least an hour,” he warned her.

“You do what you need,” she said. “If we get separated, you can go ahead and take the shuttle back up.”

“He’ll skin me alive if I do that, Chief.”

“He’ll skin me alive, too. But I’m not sticking around here if it means dealing with stringers.” If she had to choose between Greg’s anger and the full force of the press corps, she would face her captain’s rage.

His lips thinned, and he shook his head. “Stubborn,” he murmured, and she knew she’d won this one.

As they were walking up to the station’s entrance, a wide gap open to the building’s lobby, she caught sight of a man halfway up the block, slouching against the wall, eyes looking ahead at nothing, as if he were listening to a comm. He was absurdly thin, absurdly tall, and absurdly handsome.

She cursed.

“Bloody Ancher,” she said to Bob’s look. Ancher was a stringer: a professional journalist who had covered the Corps for years. He was tenacious, good-natured, and entirely without ethics. “Someone’s leaked that the dead man is a soldier.”

“Then we’d better get it done,” Bob said wearily, and opened the door.

The desk officer, a young man with disapproving eyes, checked her weapon and directed them upstairs to the main office, a wide, airy room spanning the width of the building. Behind the reception desk stood a young woman, pale and petite, like Jessica; but her hair was dark, her skin was free of freckles, and she lacked Jess’s palpable exuberance. She watched them patiently, and Elena stood back, allowing Bob to handle the social aspects. “Good afternoon,” he said to the officer. “We’re here to see Chief Stoya.”

He flashed her a smile that Elena had long ago noted many women—even as young as this one—found charming. Elena saw the pale cheeks color a little, and her dark eyes warmed. “Of course,” she replied easily, giving Elena a perfunctory glance. “I’ll let him know you’re here.” She walked off toward the private offices that lined the room’s interior walls.

One of the office doors opened, and the weary-eyed Chief Stoya emerged. In person he seemed smaller, although he was easily Elena’s height. She thought the illusion came from the way he moved, compact and efficient, threading himself between the desks with ease. He scanned the room with wary intelligence, and despite his cold expression she wondered if he would prove more flexible than she had assumed.

She did not have to wonder long. He shot her a look of open dislike, then let his gaze settle on Bob. “You are Doctor Hastings,” he said. His rigid mouth thinned. “Doctor Velikovsky is waiting for you downstairs in the morgue,” he said. “Officer Keller will escort you.”

That accent again, different from that of the locals she had heard in the city, and still vaguely familiar. He sounded like some of the traders she knew, and she wondered if he had spent time in the Fourth Sector. Cygnus, maybe, or Osaka Prime. Someplace with money.

Bob favored Keller, the young woman at the desk, with a pleased smile. “That’s very kind of you, Chief,” he said, and Elena thought his warmth was sincere.

As Keller made her way around the desk, Stoya locked his eyes on Elena. They were cold, those weary eyes; ice-blue and clear, but barren of any emotion at all.

“Captain Foster says you are a material witness,” he said. “You will make a statement, on the record?”

She nodded, and caught a flicker of emotion in his face, too quick to identify.

“Very well. Luvidovich!” he shouted.

Another office door opened, and Luvidovich emerged. She saw him hesitate, his confident expression wavering, and then his face darkened as he realized she was about to ruin his day. She had wondered if he would remember her.

It was still not payback enough.

He kept his eyes on her as he approached. “Yes, sir,” he said to Stoya when he was close enough.

“This woman,” Stoya said, “claims she can provide Zajec with an alibi. Set up the polygraph and take her statement.”

Luvidovich flushed, and she saw his teeth clench. “That is not possible.”

Stoya gave an impatient sigh. “If it is not possible, she will fail the polygraph. And then, if you wish, you may charge her with obstruction of justice. But until that happens, do as you are told.” He added a phrase in the local dialect; Elena, despite her passing familiarity with the language, missed it entirely.

Luvidovich, however, did not miss it at all. He colored more deeply, but straightened up, composing himself. He glanced back at Elena, then looked away as quickly as he could. “Follow me,” he told her.

Elena turned and met Bob’s eyes; he nodded at her, and she followed Luvidovich out of the room.

Luvidovich took her statement in a small, dank, and poorly lit basement room, with the help of an ancient polygraph. At times he seemed to believe he was interrogating her, challenging the sequence of events and accusing her of saying things she had not said; but after a quarter of an hour it struck her that however hostile his delivery, Luvidovich was doing his job, and fairly well. She thought she might have misjudged him, at least a little. No professional police officer would release a suspect lightly.

But it was not until they had left the polygraph behind and were heading up the stairs to the lobby that he asked her anything about Danny himself.

“Did you know the dead man well?”

She could not see his face, but his tone was overcasual, and she tensed. “There are just over two hundred and fifty people on board right now,” she told him. “We all know each other well.” It was only a slight exaggeration.

“Did you speak to him about Volhynia before you came?”

The question threw her, and she felt a glimmer of relief; she had been expecting something more personal. “He was talking to people about the planet’s history—its stability, agriculture, how the population dealt with the pulsar. Not much else, though.” He had sounded like a tourist the first time away from home; they had all teased him. Something rolled over in her stomach, and she bit her tongue to quiet it.

“It was the pulsar that interested him?” Luvidovich’s tone had sharpened.

“He mentioned it,” she repeated. “But he spoke of a lot of things.” He has found something. Despite his earlier hostility, she could not keep from pressing him. “What is it?”

He was silent as he climbed the last few steps, and when he turned as the door opened, she thought he was going to answer her. But she became abruptly aware of the audience that stood beyond the doorway: a dozen members of the press, gathered in a polite crowd in the station’s foyer. Before them, his hands behind his back like a field admiral, stood Chief Stoya. Luvidovich’s expression went flat.

“I must ask you to wait, Commander Shaw.” The police chief’s voice was even as he stepped forward to face her down. Elena watched him warily; next to her, Luvidovich did not move. Stoya had not acknowledged his subordinate at all. “Are you aware of our laws governing obstruction of justice? I should like to know why Central is choosing to champion a known criminal.”

He had listened in as she made her statement, of course—she had expected nothing less—but his response to it was puzzling. Hadn’t she just advanced his case by eliminating a suspect? Why would he try to discredit her? Especially in front of the press? Beside her Luvidovich shifted, his eyes quickly scanning the reporters before resting unhappily on the open entryway beyond. She did not really expect him to challenge his superior in public, but he seemed reluctant to engage Stoya at all. She was missing something.

Whatever Stoya’s reasoning, if he thought the presence of reporters would make her back off and leave, he was going to be disappointed. “It has nothing to do with championing anyone,” she said. “We wish the criminal to be brought to justice, and Captain Zajec is not responsible for this murder. You’re not going to find the one who killed my crewmate by pursuing some personal vendetta against one of your own.”

That caught Luvidovich’s attention. He turned on her, face reddening, his stiff discomfort erupting suddenly into rage. “He is not one of our own!” That same quick temper from the night before; she wondered if his problem was with Captain Zajec, or if he disliked all foreigners. She found her curiosity becoming an annoyance; when had this stopped being about Danny?

Deliberately, she took a step toward Luvidovich. “And what is your standard for that? Because he grew up somewhere else? So did your own police chief, and that doesn’t seem to bother you at all.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Stoya’s face flicker with surprise, and she felt a moment’s satisfaction. He had not expected her to know.

“You make me wonder if this is typical on Volhynia,” Elena continued. The anger that had been building since she had learned of Danny’s death began to rise in the back of her throat. Luvidovich knew something, dammit, and she couldn’t understand why he was stonewalling her. “That you would fabricate evidence against someone simply because you dislike him, and then try to discredit someone who points out your error. Perhaps your department hasn’t the skills to do the job properly. Is that the problem? Or is it just that the case has been botched by your off-worlder police chief?”

She knew she was deliberately provoking Luvidovich, but she was utterly unprepared for his response to the remark. His face went purple, and his hands were shaking, but he was not looking at her anymore. He was staring over her shoulder at Stoya, and she thought what she saw in his eyes was desperation.

For the first time that day, since Greg had told her of Danny’s death, everything came abruptly into focus. She thought of Zajec’s bloodied face, of the look of resignation in his eyes, of Luvidovich mentioning Danny only where Stoya would not overhear. Something hot and sharp began to grow in her stomach. “You’re not going to investigate this at all, are you?”

Luvidovich turned to her and opened his mouth to retort, but she shook her head. “No, that’s why you didn’t ask me about Danny in the interrogation. None of this is about him at all. This is about someone you don’t like.” She turned to Stoya; his stony expression had not changed. A wave of revulsion overcame her, and suddenly she didn’t care that the press was there, that the whole conversation would get back to Greg, who would almost certainly yell at her again. “What kind of people are you?”

“Let me assure you, Commander Shaw,” Stoya said with infuriating calm, “we have no intention of abandoning our investigation.”

“You are a liar, Stoya.” Behind her she heard the reporters murmuring, but she was done with tact. “You’ve got an off-worlder corpse and an off-worlder suspect, and the only reason anyone is focusing on your manufactured case instead of an incompetent off-worlder police chief is that PSI makes an easy target. What in the hell is wrong with this place?”

Stoya stood back, his expression stoic, but Luvidovich was furious. “Chief Stoya has done more for Volhynia than you and your useless soldiers have done in five hundred years!” he shouted. “Who do you think you are, coming to our world and accusing an honest man?”

“You started it,” she snapped.

At that Luvidovich lunged, but before he could reach her, Stoya held out an arm, and the younger officer stumbled against it. She had not even had time to flinch. “It is Stoya who has been fighting for this city, for this world,” Luvidovich continued, fists still clenched. “You are the one who is letting a murderer go free!”

“Perhaps we should all calm down,” Stoya said. He fixed his cold gaze on Elena, still holding off Luvidovich. “As far as our case against Captain Zajec is concerned, there is still the possibility of conspiracy—”

“Oh, bullshit,” she said. “If you had anything on him, you wouldn’t have cared what I had to say. He’s innocent, and you know it, and all of those people”—she gestured toward the reporters—“know it, too. While you’re idly persecuting an innocent man, there’s a killer wandering around. Is that your way of ‘fighting for this city’? Do you really think Central Corps is going to sit on their hands while you waste time fucking this up?”

It was a baseless threat, and she suspected Stoya knew it. At the same time … whatever her arguments with Greg, however angry he would be with her for losing her temper, she could not believe he would sit by and watch the police do nothing. Greg had been Danny’s captain. In the end, Danny had belonged to Greg more than he had to her.

Stoya raised his eyebrows at her mention of Central. “The citizens here chose me,” he said. “They have not chosen Central. What kind of goodwill do you suppose you would gain by trying to take over?”

Goodwill. She almost laughed. “I rather imagine the Corps will take justice over goodwill, especially when it comes to the death of one of their own. Are you going to release Captain Zajec, or not?”

He stared at her a moment without moving: one last gesture of control. But in the end he shrugged, and nodded. “There is no need for a Central invasion, Commander Shaw,” he said. “We will release Captain Zajec. Our investigation will continue.”

She didn’t believe him. Danny meant nothing to him. The murderer meant nothing to him. She didn’t know why, but Stoya was hell-bent on pinning the crime on Zajec. And Luvidovich, for all his doubts, couldn’t get far enough past his own biases to listen to his instincts. If she were not angry enough to choke the pair of them, she might have felt sorry for the young man.

Stoya, on the other hand, could go straight to hell.

With some effort, she controlled her temper. That she no longer believed that Zajec’s innocence would make a difference to the police did not change the fact that she needed to get him out of prison. As far as justice for Danny was concerned … it seemed possible, she had to admit, that Stoya’s insistence on framing the PSI captain was not coincidence. Greg was wrong about what Captain Zajec had wanted from her, but she was beginning to share his fear that PSI was a piece of this somehow.

“Excellent,” was all she said aloud. “I look forward to the successful resolution of this case.” Her eyes flicked dismissively to Luvidovich, still vibrating with anger; despite herself, she could not resist a parting shot. “But you may want to call off your dog before somebody puts him down.”

She turned away from the two men, ignoring the silent stares of the press and the open-mouthed gape of the desk officer. Her comm chimed insistently as she headed up the stairs.

She did not answer it.

CHAPTER 9

It was only when he began to see lights before his eyes that Trey realized there was something unusual going on.

In the six months since he had returned to Volhynia he had been arrested a handful of times, albeit on charges far less serious than suspicion of murder. Each time the interrogations had been carefully restrained, designed more to intimidate and demoralize than cause injury. Luvidovich, who could not have known Trey’s experiences as a child, seemed to believe Trey ought to be learning a lesson, and Trey was always surprised at how quickly his stoicism crawled under the officer’s skin. It was petty, but he took a grim pleasure in that small, useless act of defiance.

This interrogation was different, though, and Trey began to wonder if his innocence mattered at all.

Trey had been escorted to one of the dark basement interview rooms and shoved into a hard chair. Luvidovich had spent the first hour of the interrogation doing nothing but hitting Trey, who knew enough of Volhynia’s authoritarian rules to refrain from hitting back, even when his vision tunneled and he began to feel nauseated. The questions, when they finally arrived, included predefined answers, and Trey realized Luvidovich was dictating his confession. After attempting to assert the truth—no, he did not know the victim; yes, he had been home all night—he had stopped answering and started to listen. His head was alarmingly foggy, but even so he could see how thin the story was: Luvidovich was suggesting that he had, for unknown reasons, followed the soldier into the alley behind his own workplace and killed him for an unknown sum of money that had not been found.

“Do you know,” Trey said at last, unable to restrain himself, “that is a remarkably foolish story. If you have the need to frame me, you had best come up with something more substantive. Not even the courts in Novanadyr would believe this nonsense.”

That had earned him a further beating, but he had minded less.

When Luvidovich finally left, Trey seriously considered putting his head down on the table and surrendering to unconsciousness. He tried and failed to remember anything about Volhynian criminal law. He might be entitled to a lawyer, and a trial, but he was not sure. Certainly the court of public opinion would not be on his side. Most of them believed he was an off-worlder, and after forty-four years, he was in all meaningful ways. They would desperately want to believe that this had nothing to do with their friends and neighbors. He would likely be railroaded, with or without a trial, and no one would ever find out what had really happened to that poor boy.

The thought of what Katya might believe nearly drove him to despair.

The lock turned, and he tensed, lifting his head; but it was not Luvidovich who came through the door, it was Chief Stoya. Trey sat back, knowing better than to be relieved. Stoya was more observant than Luvidovich, and far more ruthless. He understood people where Luvidovich did not, and never had to resort to physical abuse. Even Trey was careful of him.

Stoya stood before the open door, frowning at Trey, his gaze thoughtful. “A woman has come here,” he said, “who claims you have not committed this crime.”

There was no way, he realized, that Stoya could miss his surprise. She should have trusted him to look after himself, should have left Volhynia to its own business. He thought of that dead boy in the alley, thought of her passion, her empathy: I know what people say. There is truth and lie in all of it.

Of course she had come back.

Deliberately, he straightened his shoulders, shifting in his chair as if he were stiff from sitting still instead of having been beaten. “Excellent,” he said. “When can I go?”

Stoya’s jaw twitched—a rare betrayal of emotion. “Luvidovich has taken her statement. We will be releasing you. For now.”

Luvidovich. Good God. Had it only been the night before that he had reminded himself he would kill Luvidovich one day? “There was no need for Luvidovich to speak to her, Stoya. She is a soldier. She knows how to make a report.”

“And now you are worried for her. This is curious, given that she says you did not meet until last night.”

Damn. He must have been more exhausted than he thought. He dropped all pretense. “Luvidovich is a thug,” he said seriously, “and she came here only to help. You know I am innocent of this.”

Stoya was younger than Trey by fifteen years, but even so Trey was taken aback by the man’s quickness. He was abruptly in front of the table, leaning toward Trey, his face so close Trey could see the shadow of stubble on his chin. “I know you are a killer, Captain Zajec,” he hissed. “That woman may absolve you this time, but she does not know what you are. She does not even know your real name, the name you gave up when you fled this place. You cannot become something else so easily. You may not have committed this crime, but we will have you. Whether it is today or tomorrow makes no difference to me.”

Trey kept his expression mild, and when he moved he was slow and careful. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood, the ache of his legs keeping him focused. Standing, he was taller than Stoya, and he allowed himself to lean forward, just a little, to look steadily into the police chief’s eyes. “But you do not have me today, Stoya.” He straightened, then walked around the table, avoiding Stoya’s eyes, and headed through the cell’s open door.

She was still beautiful, Trey thought, tall and elegant and patrician, waiting for him by the main office door. But if the night before she had seemed self-conscious, here she stood with an unconcerned composure that suggested she had no expectation of being thwarted. A performance, almost certainly, but an effective one; he supposed it was an indispensable skill for a soldier. When he caught her eyes he saw her blush faintly, and he remembered standing with her in the moonlight and thought perhaps he had not been beaten so badly after all.

He stepped up to the desk, where Reya Keller had his paperwork ready. “Just here,” she told him, gesturing at the thumbprint square. When he moved to approve it, she spoke more quietly. “There are reporters outside,” she whispered. “A lot of them.”

He looked at her. Reya was a girl of about twenty, and considered a good police officer, if inexperienced. Unlike many of the others, though, she treated him with respect every time Luvidovich dragged him in. Once she had slipped him a small bottle of analgesic on his way out; he had plenty of the stuff back in his flat, but the gesture had touched him.

“Thank you,” he said, and she nodded, a smile flickering across her face before she backed away.

Trey turned, and took a step toward the woman. She looked guarded, and a little hesitant; he supposed he looked the same. He wanted to tell her he was pleased to see her again. He wanted to tell her to go home. Instead he said, “You did not have to wait for me.”

She looked away, and he wished he had been more welcoming. “I did, actually,” she told him. “It seems your police department has no intention of investigating properly.”

He was surprised Stoya had tipped his hand in front of her. “You believe you can make up for their deficit?”

“That’s my intent, yes. Does this place have a back door?”

“You wish to avoid the press.”

Her face warmed again. “I already have their attention. I’d just as soon avoid entertaining them again.”

He had missed more, it seemed, than just her arrival. “There is a rear exit,” he told her. “But we will need someone to let us out.”

In the end it was Reya who helped them, escorting them down a poorly lit back stairway. He fell into step next to the woman—the soldier, he realized. She moved differently here, confident and unhesitating. She was a good deal more forbidding than she had been the night before, and he wondered once again exactly who she was on her starship. At thirty-two, she was young for command, but she carried herself as someone accustomed to being obeyed.

Valeria’s voice echoed in his head. It is not women you like; it is power. He had laughed at her and told her it was powerful women. That exchange had been decades ago. It seemed his tastes had not changed.

Reya left them briefly at the back of the building to retrieve the woman’s weapon from the desk sergeant. She released the door’s voice lock, and Trey stepped through into an alley. He began walking toward the street, the woman next to him, the afternoon sunlight a balm against his face.

They had taken no more than two steps on the main sidewalk before he heard footsteps running behind them. “Hey, Chief!” a man’s voice called. Not all of the press had missed their surreptitious exit, apparently. Trey glanced at the woman; she neither slowed nor reacted, and he followed suit.

After a moment the man caught up, falling into step next to Trey. Tall, slim, with vid-ready good looks, he wore a perpetual manic grin that was almost absurd enough to distract from the shrewd gleam in his eyes. He held his hand out to Trey.

“You’re Treiko Zajec,” the man said. “Cholan Ancher, Corps press corps.” He laughed at his own joke.

Trey considered, then took the offered hand. “How do you do, Mr. Ancher?”

Ancher’s grin widened. “Better now. You’re a legend, you know. It’ll be something, telling people you shook my hand.”

“What do you want, Ancher?” the woman finally said.

Trey looked at her again. Her demeanor had not changed, but he thought he detected a hint of annoyance in her voice.

“You’re always so suspicious,” Ancher said cheerfully.

“That’s because I know you.”

“Are you still holding a grudge?” She said nothing, and this time the reporter didn’t laugh. “I was doing my job, Chief.”

“So was I.”

And damned if Ancher didn’t look uncomfortable.

“Well, maybe I can make it up to you,” he told her.

“How would you do that?”

“I have an ID on your dead man.”

And that stopped her. Trey watched her look over to the reporter, and wondered if she had the authority to back up the murder in her eyes.

But Ancher did not back off, or stand down. Instead, his face softened into something almost human. “I know who he was, Chief,” he repeated. “And I know who he was to you.”

Trey saw her turn ashen, then go red; she looked away for a moment. When she turned back she met Trey’s eyes, and she was the woman he had known the night before: vulnerable and transparent. The sadness he saw in her told him all of it. That boy, he thought, remembering what he had found just a few hours before. Alive, he would have been tall, young, handsome.

The boy she had loved.

“My dear lady,” he said gently, “I am so sorry.”

Her eyes brightened for a moment, and then she shook her head. “He was not mine,” she told him. “Not anymore. He’s not for me to grieve. But if it gets out …”

“… the alibi you have given me will look quite different.”

“Wait,” Ancher said. “She’s your alibi?”

PSI did not have journalists who followed them, like Central did, but Trey recognized the tone of a reporter who had landed on a story. How to best handle the situation depended on the reporter, and he did not know this one. This woman—Chief, Ancher had called her—seemed to have some sway over him, though. Trey opted to give the man a chance.

“If you would give us a moment, Mr. Ancher,” he said.

The reporter looked suspicious, but when Trey stepped aside, the woman following him, Ancher let them be.

“What will your crew say when the police talk to them?” he asked her.

She grasped her elbows. “Depends on who they talk to. The Galileo crew won’t be inclined to share, but we have some loaners on board that we borrowed to deliver cargo. Danny … he was tight with them, and they don’t like me much.”

“So it will come out.” When she nodded, he said, “Would your friend Mr. Ancher spin the story for you?”

“Would it matter if he did?”

“No,” he admitted. “They will use it as an excuse to detain me again, and possibly you as well.”

“That excuse or another, they’ll find a reason.” Her eyebrows drew together. “We’ve got to find out what happened before they come after you again.”

“My dear, I think we had best rid ourselves of your reporter before we discuss this more deeply.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ancher called over. “My ears aren’t that good.”

She gave Ancher a look, then turned toward him, pulling him into their conversation. “Why haven’t you gone public with this?”

“I told you,” he said. “I figure maybe I owe you one. But I can’t sit on it forever, Chief. Someone else will find out, and they’ll broadcast.”

“How much time can you get me?”

“Five hours, maybe six.” He began to sound like a reporter again. “What do I get for it?”

“What do you want?”

“An interview.” His gaze took in Trey. “With both of you. And Captain Foster.”

“No deal. Leak it, and I’ll take my chances.” She turned and began to walk away, and Trey moved to follow her.

“Wait, wait!” Ancher scurried to catch up. “Just you, Chief. But an exclusive. Nothing for those streamer scavengers, okay? Not a word.”

Her reply was just as prompt. “Done,” she said. “But if I hear so much as a rumor anywhere on comms in the next six hours, Ancher, you are shut out for good. Not just on this, but on everything. You understand?”

That, Trey knew, was a serious threat for a reporter, and she delivered it sincerely. But Ancher just gave her that cocky smile again. “Loud and clear, Chief.” He winked at Trey. “You kids have a nice day.” He turned, and walked off the way he had come.

They both watched him until he was well out of earshot, and then Trey turned to her. He could see the shadows under her eyes, and her expression held a hint of desperation. Closer to the edge than she was letting on. “What of Central?” he asked. “Will they get involved?”

She paused before answering, and he wondered if that was good or bad. “Not in a way that will help,” she said at last. “Central’s rigid when it comes to troops on Volhynia, and I didn’t do myself any favors by losing my temper in front of the press. There’s a good chance they’ll demand I leave, which means we need to—”

Her comm chimed, and she muted it, but almost immediately the tone was repeated. This time she frowned, resigned. “I apologize,” she said to him.

“For what?”

“For this,” she replied, and completed the connection.

“You have fifteen seconds,” a man’s voice said, low and menacing, “to explain why you cut me off. Twice.”

Her response was terse. “I was busy.”

There was a pause before the man replied. “You were busy?” His incredulity was palpable. “Was this five seconds ago, or while you were having a tantrum in front of the fucking chief of police, not to mention every goddamned streamer in this sector? You realize your entire chain of command is watching that right now?”

She swore, looking chagrined.

“Yeah, now you’re thinking about it, after it’s out on the public fucking stream! Now how about you answer the question, Chief, before I bust you back to ensign for insubordination?”

This, Trey realized, had to be her captain, and he was using a tone Trey, who’d had to use it on occasion, recognized very well. What was curious was her complete lack of deference. “How about this?” she snapped in return. “How about I knew all you were going to do was shriek at me, and I had better things to do than listen?”

“You—are you forgetting my direct order? The one where you give that pirate his alibi, and get your ass back to the ship? The one that did not include threatening the local cops with authority you don’t have before you snuck out the back door?”

Trey’s stomach turned. She did not know the people she was dealing with. “What did you say to the police?”

She looked away. “I told them Central would take over the investigation if they didn’t do it properly.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Captain Zajec, sir.”

Another pause on the line. “Captain,” the man said formally, as if he had not been threatening his officer a moment before, “we haven’t been introduced. I’m Captain Greg Foster, CCSS Galileo.”

Trey knew his name, of course, and a little of his reputation, but he did not think the circumstances were shedding the best light on the man. “A pleasure, Captain,” Trey told him, “but I do not use my title any longer. May I express my condolences on the loss of your officer.”

This time Trey heard him sigh. “Thank you, Mr. Zajec,” Foster said, and he sounded old and tired. “And may I say, I am sorry you’ve become tangled in all of this. Our only goal is to see the killer brought to justice.”

Glib and practiced, Trey thought, but not necessarily insincere. “Thank you, Captain. Although I do not think our police are yet convinced they should look elsewhere.”

“Why did they suspect you to begin with?” Foster asked.

Trey closed his eyes and ran a hand over his face; he did not want to have this conversation now, but he could not see Foster allowing him to put it off. “A number of reasons, actually,” he told the captain, feeling the woman’s eyes on him. “One is because I was PSI, and Volhynia has an uneasy relationship with us. Stoya was appointed, in part, due to the tension between PSI and some of the local Syndicates who are moving to become legitimate traders. Another is simply because I am a stranger, and this is a small colony.” He took a breath. “Mostly, though, it is because I committed a crime here when I was a child, and they cannot prosecute me for it.”

“What did you do?”

Ah, well. It’s not like I’m ashamed of it. “I killed a man,” he said.

Trey felt rather than saw her grow still.

“If they know it, why can’t they arrest you?” Foster asked him.

They could, of course. They could arrest him, and he could confess, and even on Volhynia—even in Novanadyr, where he had so few friends—no jury would convict him. “They cannot make a case,” he said simply.

“So instead, you’re just the guy they arrest whenever they need a warm body?”

Trey risked a glance at the woman; her eyes had gone wary, and he was surprised how much that stung. “In this case they were not without reason. I found your officer outside the kitchen of the restaurant where I work. And yes, Captain, it would be a remarkable coincidence, except that the body was moved there.” He had wanted to tell her earlier, when Ancher was still there, but something had told him this was as important a detail to keep secret as her relationship to the dead man.

“How do you know?”

Trey chose as few words as he could. “There was not enough blood.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I know death.” And he thought, captain to captain, that he would not have to say anything more.

“I think Luvidovich knows it as well,” the woman said. “Stoya is keeping him from investigating properly. I don’t know why, but Luvidovich isn’t happy about it.”

“I doubt that matters,” Foster said. “After your impromptu press conference, they’re going to start asking about you as well as Danny, and they’re going to spin it as a very neat setup. I can protect the chief, Mr. Zajec, but I have no influence over the treatment of Volhynian citizens. If you’d consent to visit Galileo, we could offer you protection.”

Her expression had changed, grown wary again. This time, however, Trey did not think she was being wary of him. There was more to this conversation than he was seeing. “Thank you, Captain,” he said formally, “but I prefer to take my chances. My family is here.”

“We could protect them, too, if it comes down to it. This whole thing should be cleared up in a few days, and it’d be one less thing for us all to worry about.”

Odd, Trey thought. First an offer of help, then manipulation. The woman was looking away, squinting into the afternoon sun, her lips thin. “I will consider your offer,” he said at last. It was the truth, at least. “But for now, I would like to remain home.”

“The offer stands if you change your mind. Chief, I’ll expect you back here in—”

“I’m staying, Greg.” She said it quietly, and with complete conviction.

There was a long pause. Based on Foster’s behavior so far, Trey would have expected the captain to start shouting again. Instead, when he spoke, his voice was immeasurably more gentle, and Trey began to wonder at the relationship between the captain and his subordinate. “We’ve discussed this already, Chief.”

“We haven’t,” she told him. Her voice was tight, as if she had swallowed something thick. “I owe him.”

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