cursed, and Arin spoke up. “Listen, Lanie, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to him. It’ll be fine.”
“Sit still,” she said shortly, and Arin fell silent again, his expression closing. Dammit, she’d hurt his feelings again. He did not understand.
How could he? He’s just a kid.
Who you nearly got killed.
She looked up. Herrod was watching her, his black eyes unreadable. She hadn’t seen his face in a year and a half, and he looked older than she remembered. Much older. She did the math in her head: he’d be seventy-nine now. She supposed some years were harsher than others.
Not that he didn’t deserve it.
She glanced behind her to where Bristol and Darrow were sitting with the others. Bristol blanched, his pale skin communicating his feelings without words, and she nearly smiled. She’d always intimidated him. She wasn’t entirely sure why. He was older than she was, and much bigger; but she had to admit he’d annoyed her fairly often, and she’d let him know it. Some people seemed to find her annoyance frightening. When she had been in the Corps, that had been useful.
Rebecca Darrow gave her a friendly nod. “Good to see you, Chief,” she said.
I’m not Chief anymore, Elena thought; but she didn’t correct her. “You too, Becky,” she said. Darrow hadn’t changed: tall, sturdily built, straight jet-black hair, smooth, gold-tan skin without anything resembling a line or blemish. She would look the same at sixty as she did now. After eighteen months away, Elena found the effect unnerving: it would be so easy to tell herself it had all been an illusion, from the transfer to her resignation to this awful day.
Just like Becky Darrow, Greg had not changed. He had stormed in—unasked, as usual—and she had fallen into step with him as if they had never been apart. That had been, she had realized since she left the Corps, one of the foundations of their friendship: they strategized the same way. In the field, in a crisis, their communication was fluid and efficient: no arguments, no power struggles, just solutions. She had always liked working with him, because he made sense. She had been startled as hell the first time she’d learned not everyone felt the same.
She tugged off her hood and smoothed the damp strands of hair out of her eyes. “Can you guys watch him?” she asked Bristol and Darrow. When they nodded, she climbed to her feet and headed for the front of the cabin. This was not the place for their long-overdue conversation, but that wasn’t the only conversation they needed to have.
She slid into the copilot’s seat and looked over at Greg. She wasn’t sure why she had expected him to look different; a year was not so much time. He was still tall, still slim, still square-jawed and flawlessly handsome, still striking with his bright gray and black eyes against his dark skin. Even his hair was the same, cropped so close he was nearly bald. She had asked him, once, why he kept it so short, and he’d said, “Because I like how it feels when I have to slap my head in frustration.” Then he had laughed, and she had never been sure his answer was serious.
She could tell he knew she was looking at him. Years ago, before things had become strange between them, he would have asked her what was wrong. Maybe he doesn’t care anymore, she thought, and was hit by a wave of unexpected loneliness. She had to take a moment to swallow it away.
“Thank you,” she said, “for coming after us.”
“Dumbass place for a cargo shuttle,” he remarked.
“We don’t make the drop, we don’t get paid.”
“In a case like this, maybe it’s a fair trade.” He paused. “Are you guys going to get stiffed on this one?”
“Bear said the import officer told him as long as the cargo was close enough to the cultivation dome for them to retrieve it, he’d sign off.” She sighed. “I don’t know if we’re going to get stiffed. Our accountant will fight that fight. If we don’t get the money, she’ll have to figure out another way to make up the shortfall.”
“So your accountant is a magician.”
Elena thought of Naina, scrupulously honest, dissecting every financial loophole available for the company that employed her. “Yeah, she kind of is. Listen, Greg.” That got his attention. “I want to ask a favor.”
She half expected him to summarily eject her from the shuttle for her nerve, but he just said, “Okay.”
“Do you remember Jamyung, the trader we used to buy parts from?”
He did, and she told him the story, from the comm she had received earlier that day, to arriving in Smolensk to find Jamyung murdered, to Dallas’s story of the strangers who killed him. “But that’s not the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is this … thing he left for me. This artifact. I thought he was bullshitting when he said it talked to him, but it talked to me, too.”
At that he frowned, that familiar formidable scowl, and she knew then he was focused on the problem. “Show me.”
She took the box out of her pocket, and he raised his eyebrows at her. “I should probably have tossed it,” she admitted. “But … there’s something about it. I can’t really explain.”
He took it from her and opened the box. As he stared at the artifact, his expression eased into curiosity. She wondered if, as she did, he found it beautiful. “His scout found this on the surface? What was it a part of?”
“No idea.” He reached out a finger, and she held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t do that. That’s when it talked to me, when I touched it.”
His eyes locked with hers. “What did it say?”
“That’s …” She struggled to explain the message. “It was nonsense, really. Overlapping voices, noises, rhythm. And then, emerging from the static, one word. Galileo. Over and over again.”
She hadn’t wanted to tell him, but somehow he had seen it in her face. “It affected you,” he realized, and she nodded.
“It left me feeling … lonely, I guess. And really disoriented. I almost crashed us without the help of those attackers. Greg, if it’s some kind of a weapon …”
“Not much of a weapon if you have to touch it first.”
“Maybe it’s a prototype.”
“That will evolve into a non-contact weapon?” He kept frowning at the artifact, but when he reached out to close the box, she thought he was reluctant. “What’s the favor?”
“I don’t have anything on Budapest sophisticated enough to scan something like that,” she told him. “I was wondering if Ted could look at it. Galileo’s deep scanners would give us soup to nuts on what it’s really doing.”
He nodded. “Of course. I’ll pass it on.” He looked back at her. “You said this came in over your comm? Can you give me a copy of the message?”
That should have been an easy question to answer. She should have sent him over a copy without hesitation. If it had been Greg alone … but she thought of Ted, and the open engineering floor, and all those soldiers, some of whom she didn’t even know, listening
