did sound agitated, and out of breath, as if he had been running before he commed her.
“Who else would it be?” she asked.
He huffed a breath in her ear. “Fuck me, Shaw, do you know how long it took me to find you? You left the fucking Corps, and nobody at that goddamned Admiralty of yours would tell me where you were. What the fuck?”
“If I’d known you were looking I’d have sent up a flare.” There would have been no reason for the Admiralty to help him, even if they could have. She used to be certain her former commanders—or at least Shadow Ops, their secret intelligence division—had kept track of her location, even after she resigned. At this point, though, she was inclined to believe she didn’t matter to them anymore. None of which is his fault. “Did you call me to yell, Jamyung?”
“No. No, no, no.” Another huff. “Not yell. But I need a favor.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re a straight shooter,” he said. “These other Central motherfuckers, you can’t trust them. And the freighter jocks—they haggle over shit like they’re fucking royalty, like I don’t know I’m the only one in six systems with that fucking field regulator they need to keep from blowing themselves to bits. Condescending assholes.”
She unraveled that. “You’re asking for a favor because you trust me.”
“Yes. Yes. Because they’ll just tell me I’m fucking nuts, and I need a fucking favor, Shaw.” He was beginning to sound frightened. “You don’t know. Lately, here, it’s been—shit.” Huff. “I am fucked, we are all fucked, and I need a favor, and I have to get rid of this thing.”
“Calm down.” She glanced at Arin, who had straightened, ignoring the cat, eyes on Elena. She gave him a reassuring smile, then stepped away, rounding the shipping cartons for some privacy. “Why are you fucked? What thing? Start from the beginning.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay.” Huff. “So you know it’s been fucked here, dome-wise, since the Great Terraformer Experiment went to hell. Fucking politicians killing each other instead of fucking doing something to help people. Same old shit my whole fucking life, because those assholes are fucking bored or something, I don’t know. Never made any fucking sense to me. And yeah, I make money off of it, usually, and why do I care if some lying dumbass governor loses some air?”
Jamyung was big on storytelling when he was trying to sell something, but he wasn’t sounding like he had parts to move. “So it’s fucked there … and you don’t care?”
“Yes. No. Because it’s not just the usual bullshit this time. This time people keep talking about nukes. Asking me if I can get them, then getting really fucking you-didn’t-hear-us-ask when I tell them I can’t.”
Nukes. On a domed colony. Shit. “Is this a reliable rumor, or just the usual mine-is-bigger crap?”
“Reliable. Solid. They keep naming a Syndicate tribe: Ailmont. They’re the real deal.”
“I’m not Corps anymore,” she told him. “I can’t stop the Syndicates from selling their own cargo.”
“Yeah, but now they’ve been fucking with me, and they keep coming back, and fuck it, Shaw, I can’t give them this thing.”
She parsed that. “Wait. You have something somebody is after?”
“Do you know what this fucking thing can do? I can’t sell it to them!”
She closed her eyes. “From the beginning. What thing?”
Huff. “Okay. Okay. I have this scavenger. Had this scavenger. Few days back, she brings me this thing she found on the surface. No idea what it is, but it’s warm, and it’s not radiating fucking poison, so she thought it must be something useful. Next day—a pack of those assholes from Baikul fucking vacates her. A good fucking scout, too, and now she’s a fucking frozen dessert.”
Vacated. Local slang for exposing someone on the moon’s airless surface. Elena gave an involuntary shiver. “Could be unrelated.”
“And then,” he went on, as if she’d said nothing, “I get an offer from some off-world trader I’ve never heard of to buy out my stock. A generous offer. A stupid generous offer, you know? Only it comes with a side order of take it or we’ll fucking kill you and take your shit anyway.”
She frowned. “They were that explicit?”
“Of course not! But it was clear. And it’s this thing, Shaw. This fucking thing. I know it is.”
“Then why not just give it to them?”
“Here’s the thing.” Huff. “I sell shit. I’ve always sold shit. Your shit, their shit, I don’t care. I have it, you need it, I’m taking your money, no questions asked. But … this thing, Shaw. I don’t know what the fuck it is, but I don’t want it in the hands of the we’ll fucking kill you anyway crowd.”
“Why not?” Ethics seemed entirely out of character for Jamyung. “What is it?”
“I just told you! I don’t know what the fuck it is. But …” She heard him swallow. “It talked to me, Shaw. It got into my head and fucking talked to me and I’d nuke it if I could, but with my luck it’s built to survive that.”
“Hang on.” She sorted through everything he’d said. If the conflict on Yakutsk was finally—after centuries of low-level squabbling—escalating into a nuclear conflict, he was right to be panicked. Nukes could destroy domes with alarming efficiency. Everything else sounded like unrelated events strung into some loosely related cause-and-effect chain generated by his anxiety.
Except the object.
“How did it talk to you? Does it have a comms interface?”
“It has no interface. It’s a fucking box. Nothing on the surface, no lights, no connectors, no nothing. Only it’s warm. Martine said it was warm when she found it, out on the surface in the fucking vacuum.”
She had to ask. “What did it say?”
“It said Get the fuck off Yakutsk, Jamyung. Smartest fucking box I’ve ever found. I need airlift, Shaw. I need someone to get me off this fucking rock before they shove me outside as well. You’re my last hope here.”
There was the drop. The story of the object was likely a shaggy-dog tale couching his request … but she had known him a long time, and despite a business model that might have pushed him to do it, he had never lied to her.
She owed the truth to him in return … but she didn’t think he’d want to hear it. Nukes on Yakutsk meant Bear would have to cancel the whole drop. Budapest was staffed with civilian freighter jocks who’d have no idea how to handle a nuclear zone, and she couldn’t protect them all on her own.
“I can’t tell you when we’re going to get there,” she said, with a pang of guilt at the prevarication. “But Galileo is close. Less than four hours, I think. Tell them we talked. They’ll take you.”
“After all this, you’re shucking me off on the fucking Corps?”
