eyes. Taras can take her when Meridia gets here, but I don’t want Galileo at risk.”
“You’re thinking maybe rescuing her isn’t the best idea?”
“I’m thinking,” he told her, “that being kind doesn’t mean we have to be stupid.”
How’s the kid?” Ted asked Jessica.
Jessica was seated in Ted’s office, her feet on his desk, going over the history of Commander Tatiana Ilyana. The easiest thing, as it turned out, had been to find her original name: Leslie Barrett Millar, born on Achinsk, reported as a runaway at seventeen after a history of run-ins with the police at government protests. What was more interesting than her early history, though, was the reason it was easy to find: the Admiralty had commissioned a similar search on Ilyana nearly twenty years ago. Greg, as it turned out, had been right to be concerned: the Admiralty, although lacking concrete proof, believed she was a fairly accomplished spy.
Of course, with PSI having been allied with Central almost without interruption for hundreds of years, she wasn’t sure why the Admiralty would be worried about a spy. She had been thinking, lately—as rumors swirled about colonies in the Fifth Sector wanting to shift the seat of Central Gov to their territory, leaving Earth in political limbo—that Central had wasted a lot of time over the decades worrying about PSI. PSI was often secretive, and certainly standoffish to a degree that Gov seemed to find puzzling. But in every instance that had mattered, Jessica had seen PSI step up and fight on the same side as Gov, the Corps, and the colonies.
Besides, she thought, thinking of Admiral Herrod, Central has plenty of accomplished spies of their own.
She looked up at Ted, who was leaning against one of the office’s windowed walls, his back to the open engine room outside. Ted never sat at his desk. Ever since he had been appointed chief of engineering, he had used the office, but never sat in the chair. He hadn’t said so, but she knew in his mind it was Elena’s. Of course, it might also have been Ted’s endless kinetic energy—he was not big on sitting at the best of times—but given how his teeth set every time someone called him Chief, she didn’t think that was the main reason.
“Stabilized, Bob says,” she replied. “If he were one of us, Bob would already have cut him loose. As it is, he wants to sit on him until Budapest has to leave.”
“So he’s worried.”
“I think cautious is probably more accurate.” Or, she thought, possibly territorial. For a cynical old man, Bob became deeply possessive of his patients, especially those who had been badly hurt. “If he was worried, he’d tell Bear to delay their next drop and stick around. I’m not so sure Bear won’t do it anyway.”
Ted was watching her curiously. “This kind of worrying familiar to you, Jessie?”
She met his eyes as neutrally as she could. “More than I’d like it to be,” she admitted. Ted knew her too well. “Ted, you’ve been around a bit.”
“You’ve been listening to gossip again, haven’t you?”
She ignored him. “Did you ever run into this Commander Ilyana?”
He shook his head. “Never dealt with Chryse directly,” he said. “But one of the guys I originally deployed with—he’s out on Borissova now—did an airlift with Chryse’s help. Said they were unbelievably well organized, but otherwise kind of rude.”
“Not surprising, PSI being PSI.”
“That’s why I remember him remarking on it. They must have been really unpleasant.”
Which was not unusual in isolation. But Jessica thought of Greg, and his reaction to Captain Bayandi. Greg was both curious and mistrustful of the man, and she did not think he would be so concerned if Bayandi had behaved with PSI’s typical coolness.
She shoved aside her research, giving Galileo a chance to digest more records. “Did you get anything on that artifact yet?” she asked.
For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to let her change the subject. But then he pushed himself off the wall and began to pace in front of her. “So what we’ve got there,” Ted told Jessica, “is an enigma.”
“Haven’t you scanned it?”
“Oh yes. I scanned it from every possible angle with everything we’ve got.” He shook his head. “It’s shielded. No matter what I point at it, I get a happy little NO DATA back from the system. So whatever it is, it’s got better tech than we have, which does not please me.”
It did not please Jessica, either. Better tech almost certainly meant Ellis.
“But the other side of it,” he added, “is that it didn’t actually do anything.”
Jessica raised her eyebrows. “What about Lanie’s message?”
“It’s not a message.” He leaned across her and hit a panel on the desk. A waveform appeared in the air, and he reached his fingers into the image and pulled it apart. “It’s an audio amalgam of comms she’s received and sent. There’s nothing original in there at all.”
Jessica got to her feet, walking around the waveform to stand at Ted’s side. “So it tapped into her comm and composed something from what it found.” She looked up at him. “Is it just me, or is that the opposite of not doing anything?”
“Well, okay, it’s not nothing,” he allowed. “But it’s not sophisticated, Jess. It’s basically an audio compositor that uses emphasis based on frequency. It’s a parlor trick. It’s the shielding that’s more interesting, and it’s possible even that’s just a variant of the loopback virus we hit a while back.”
She frowned. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew who was after it. Or how to use it.”
“I’ve got one more test I want to try,” he told her, “but I’ve been waiting for you, just in case I pass out or something.”
“You’re going to touch it.”
“Only way, Jess.”
“If it goes after you like it did Lanie—”
“I swapped my comm out right before you got here,” he said. “If it’s doing what I think it’s doing, it’s going to give me nothing but our conversation. And of course some lovely words from you about how wonderful I am.” He grew more serious. “You with me on this?”
She sighed and dropped her feet off the desk to stand. “I suppose I might as well watch the thing melt your brain.”
At that, he shot her a grin. “I live to serve.”
He led her to a small workroom. When he closed them into the space, she raised her eyebrows at him. He shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s a paranoia thing,” he told her. “It commed Lanie when she touched it, but if it’s got an interface that gets activated on contact, I don’t want to give it access to Galileo.
