operated with ten crew instead of six, she would have had to share—and there was no separate gym space.
Early on in Budapest’s venerable life, Bear had started packing cargo to leave a two-meter gap around the edges of the storage bay. Back when she had first met the freighter captain, when she was just sixteen and awed by any interstellar vehicle, even this inelegant, utilitarian cargo ship, she had remarked on it. “It was either make space for running,” he had told her, “or set the gravity to one-point-two so people can get some exercise walking across the kitchen. The last thing you want after a long shipping run is to get home and find out none of your clothes fit you anymore.”
Elena had been young, her metabolism still half child, and the statement had confused her. Now, at nearly thirty-five, she was grateful for his practicality.
Arin lapped her for the third time, and she smiled. Bear and Yuri’s adopted son was nineteen. He was also taller than she was, and so much more energetic; but he had no patience for a marathon. She watched him disappear around the corner, his heavy footfalls echoing around the cargo and off the tall ceiling, and resisted the urge to catch up with him. Controlling her natural competitiveness had been one of her hardest lessons at the Academy, but she had learned to pick a pace and stick with it, even if it was slow. The sprints she always lost, but she had done well over long distances. She had even won a few endurance runs.
But when it came down to it, she preferred dance to running. Here on Budapest, where there was no room, she missed it. With dance, time went more quickly; when there was music, it was so much easier to let her mind drift. She would be twelve weeks without dancing, out to Yakutsk and back. Running was an efficient method of exercise, but it left her restless and bored. She needed more than the mundane rhythm of her feet against the floor, and her heartbeat in her ears. She needed more than monotony.
On top of that … running reminded her of Galileo, and of Greg. Always Greg. For so many years he had been the anchor of her routine, from breakfast to duty to the gym. She used to watch him run, kilometer after kilometer, sometimes more than twenty in a day. For years she had wondered what he was running from. She had eventually concluded that he wasn’t trying to escape anything specific; he just felt the need to run. Movement. Forward. Anywhere but here.
A broken man. She had no good reason for missing him.
Arin came around again. “Slow old woman,” he said to her as he passed, and she laughed, taking off after him. She caught up, and he ran faster; his long legs brought him past her again, but not as far as he might have wanted. When they reached the inner door, he dropped to a walk, breathing heavily. In sympathy, she stopped as well.
“‘Slow’?” she objected.
“I beat you, didn’t I?” He bent down to scratch the head of the sturdy orange tabby cat seated by the door. Mehitabel, Budapest’s standoffish and ubiquitous mascot, twitched her ears irritably and continued washing her face.
“Only because I stopped.” Elena threw a towel at him.
“I’ll make sure you catch up with me next time.” He grinned at her, and blushed, and she didn’t quite know what to make of it. She had never seen him flirt with anyone, regardless of sex. Even if she had—she was nearly old enough to be his mother. She knew he was fond of her, but it had never felt like a crush.
Although … She thought again of Greg. Heaven knows I’ve never been particularly good at picking up on that sort of thing.
She had not spoken with Greg in nearly a year. She had spent six months on the CCSS Kovalevsky after the Admiralty transferred her off of Galileo, and there they had talked frequently; but when she had decided to resign from the Corps, she had told him nothing in advance. Only Jessica Lockwood—Greg’s second-in-command and Elena’s friend—had known what Elena was going to do, and she had, after some pleading on Elena’s part, kept it to herself.
“He’s going to hit the ceiling,” Jessica had warned.
“Then the Admiralty will know he had nothing to do with it.”
In her most honest moments, Elena wasn’t entirely sure that protectiveness was the only reason she hadn’t wanted to tell Greg ahead of time. She had been increasingly careful in what she shared with him, sticking mostly with conveying any intelligence she had picked up from her crewmates on Kovalevsky. She would ask after Galileo and all of the people she loved. She would ask after him, and his father and his sister back on Earth, and tell him only good things about Kovalevsky and Captain Mirov.
Telling him the truth—that being in the Corps but not being on Galileo was like flaying her skin open every single day—would have led to a conversation she did not want to have. Returning to Galileo was not an option. In Greg’s early career, he might have had the clout to swing it, but he’d lost any influence he had on the other side of a wormhole.
Becoming a civilian, she had reasoned, would give her different intelligence channels from the ones Greg and Jessica would find through the Corps. And it would be less of a daily reminder of having left behind everything and everyone, outside of her blood family, that had ever meant anything to her.
Elena kept her eyes on the cat. Mehitabel was still not reacting to Arin’s ministrations, but Elena was certain she was beginning to hear the quiet rumble of a purr. Mehitabel did not care much for Elena—possibly, Elena had to admit, because most of their interactions involved Elena chasing the cat out of the engine room—but the animal was consistently and quietly affectionate with Arin, and Elena couldn’t fault her for that. “Maybe next time,” Elena remarked, “I won’t let you get ahead in the first place.”
Arin laughed, and Elena’s comm chimed. She reached behind her ear to acknowledge. “Morning, Yuri,” she said. “What’s up?”
Yuri was Budapest’s comms officer, second-in-command, and head mechanic. He was also nominally Elena’s superior officer; but Budapest had the reflexive informality of all civilian organizations, and she had learned—most of the time—to roll with it.
“You’ve got an incoming comm,” Yuri said, and something in his voice made her ears perk up.
“Someone I know?”
“Don’t know. A parts trader on Yakutsk, called Jamyung. Bear knows him, a little—we’ve dealt with him before, but not for a couple of years.”
Elena frowned. She did know Jamyung—she knew most of the traders in the sector, having bought from nearly all of them when she was with the Corps. Like many salvage traders, he had some dubious ethical lines, but her dealings with him had always been straightforward. If he had what she needed, he charged a fair price, and she always got exactly what he’d represented. In return, she’d turned something of a blind eye to the less legal aspects of his business.
“Why does he want to talk to me?” she asked.
“He wouldn’t tell me. He sounds a little … agitated.” Yuri paused. “You want me to cut him off?”
It had been years since she had spoken with Jamyung. She couldn’t imagine why he wanted to talk to her, never mind how he had tracked her down once he realized she wasn’t in the Corps anymore. At least it’s not monotony, she thought. “That’s all right,” she said. “Put him through.”
She could picture the expression on Yuri’s face, but he completed the connection.
“Is
