Remnants of Trust

Cali had backed down. She had, in fact, said nothing at all to Guanyin since then. Guanyin wanted to shake her for her silliness. Protectiveness was one thing, but Guanyin was the ship’s captain. If Cali had a problem with an order, the place to bring it up was not in front of the whole crew.

She had spoken briefly to Captain Foster before they arrived. All of his glib self-assurance was gone, replaced by a quiet levelheadedness that she liked much better. She had offered Aida’s help in getting Exeter’s internal comms systems linked into the external network, and Foster had accepted without qualification. They were headed toward the bow of the ship to deliver Aida to the comms center, dependent on the schematic Captain Foster had sent over, which he had told her would likely be out of date. That should not have surprised her—Orunmila was being constantly reconfigured; no map but their own dynamically generated schematic would be accurate more than a few weeks—but she had not, she realized, thought of Corps ships as similarly living, changing habitats.

They came around a corner, and Guanyin caught the sound of distant voices. Instantly she halted the group, and snuffed out the lights; for a moment the absolute darkness blinded her, and then she caught a weak glimmer of light far ahead. She turned her own light on, very low, and began creeping forward again; Cali, cured of her snit in the face of her duty, moved in front of her, hugging the wall as she crept forward on quiet feet. Guanyin gripped her handgun—a lethal but short-range model her arms officer had suggested as useful for avoiding unintended hull breaches—and strained to make out words.

She recognized first that they were speaking Standard. Not entirely a guarantee of safety, but most of the raiders she had run across spoke their own dialects, cobbled together from a half-dozen local languages or more, and communicated in Standard or PSI dialects roughly and with thick accents. On impulse, she commed Captain Foster. “Captain, do you have anyone aft of Control?”

“Not yet, Captain. We’ve got vacuum between here and there. What have you got?”

She was quiet again, listening. “Possible survivors, I believe. I will let you know.” She cut the comm, and nodded to Cali.

They all stopped, and Cali shouted, “Drop your weapons and stand down!”

A flurry of footsteps, the sound of weapons powering up, a series of shouts and murmurs. And then one voice, over the rest: “That’s a PSI dialect, you shitheads. Stand the fuck down.”

Guanyin placed the voice almost immediately. “It’s all right,” she told Cali and Aida. “They’re Exeter.” And striding in front of her friend, she rounded the corner.

There were eight of them, all standing on their own two feet, she noted with relief. Despite the stand-down order every one of them still had their hands on the bodies of long pulse rifles—no concerns about hull breaches here. As an afterthought she holstered her own weapon. None of them were in environmental suits, and instinctively she reached up and tugged her hood off. Instantly she was hit with the odor of burning electricals and ozone, combined with the pungent odor of human sweat. Just like home, she thought, and approached the tall man at the head of the group.

“Commander Keita, I believe,” she said, and held out her hand. “I am Captain Shiang Guanyin, of Orunmila.”

She did not think he would remember her. She had met him briefly, two years ago, shortly after he had been promoted, during one of the supply missions they had performed with Exeter. He looked older than she remembered, but otherwise she was struck by the same things: his wide, thick-necked build that made him seem even taller than he was, the chiseled, almost cruel handsomeness of his square, dark-skinned face, the strange softness of his brown eyes that made her think of an artist more than a soldier. She recalled his smile, which had moderated his features considerably; he had been quick-witted, she remembered, friendly and professional in a way that had put even Chanyu at ease. She had liked him immediately, and she felt an unexpected wave of relief at seeing his face.

He took her hand, and a shadowy version of that smile passed over his lips. “Good to see you, Captain. And thank you for stepping into the battle when you did. Without you, we’d have been dust before Galileo arrived.”

“I am grateful we were close,” she said sincerely. Beside her, Cali was radiating disapproval. “This is Lieutenant Annenkov, in charge of my security, and Mr. Aida, my comms officer. We are trying to rendezvous with Captain Foster in the bow of the ship.” She cast her eye over the rubble beyond his people. “It might be faster for us to go back to the shuttle and fly to the other side.”

Keita’s lips tightened, making him look grim again. “Captain Çelik is on the other side of that,” he explained. “He was heading from Control down to engineering—or what’s left of it—to find out what the fuck was going on with our guns, and we took a hit.”

All of her relief vanished. “What do you need?”

“Beyond shifting all this debris? Structural support, I think,” he said. “There’s no vacuum on the other side, but this whole section got hit hard. We can’t be sure we won’t be pulling the whole ceiling down by digging out.”

She could send back for some of her structural engineers, but the thought of the time it would take for them to fly over twisted the knot in her stomach. She commed Captain Foster again. “We have survivors,” she told him.

She heard him exhale sharply. “How many?”

“Eight. Commander Keita is here. And … they tell me they believe Captain Çelik is behind this debris. Do you have any structural people with you? I suspect there is some urgency here.”

“I’m going to connect my engineer,” he told her; and then a moment later: “Chief? Where are you?”

A woman’s voice, as calm and self-assured as his, responded. “We’re about a hundred meters from Control. We haven’t found anyone so far.”

“Captain Shiang is down there, with some of Exeter’s people. They’re trying to dig Captain Çelik out of some wreckage. Can you evaluate the structural situation?”

But the woman didn’t answer his question. “Who’s down there?” she asked, considerably less calm.

Guanyin opened her mouth to answer, but Commander Keita spoke first. “Songbird? Is that you?”

“Dee?” The woman sounded relieved. “My God, Dee. Are you all right?”

“I’ve got a fucking pulse, at least. Get your ass down here and help us dig the captain out.”

“Right.” The businesslike tone was back. “Thirty seconds.”

“Captain,” Guanyin put in, “I suspect there will be more need for structural evaluations. Exeter took a great many hits.”

“Agreed.” There was a hint of weariness in his voice now, as if his chief’s urgency had drained him somehow. “Can we pick up the pace on the security sweep?”

“I have another hundred people I can bring over,” she told him. “We should be able to clear the ship in thirty minutes.” Faster if you’d let him show me all those years ago, Guanyin thought bitterly at Chanyu. She could have cleared Orunmila in ten minutes, she knew the corridors so well.

“I can send a medic your way as well,” Foster offered.

It was on the tip of her tongue to refuse him. “I think that would be wise,” she agreed. “I will also bring in a team from Orunmila. Captain Çelik will not, I think, be the last casualty we find.”

As Cali commed back to Orunmila, relaying her instructions, Galileo’s people rounded the corner.

There were seven of them, all armed and armored, led by a striking woman with dark hair, as tall as Guanyin was herself. In an instant of incongruous shock, Guanyin recognized her, and she realized she should have guessed the moment Captain Foster said Chief.

When she had finally thought to search the mainstream news outlets for information on Greg Foster, she had been surprised to find he had been part of what had happened in the Fifth Sector last year. The face of Central’s involvement had been this woman’s: Commander Elena Shaw, a mechanic who had laid her life on the line for love of a retired PSI captain. Which was the popular myth, of course; Guanyin, who had little sentiment around love, suspected the reality of it was both more mundane and more complex. She had seen a brief, much-reproduced vid of Commander Shaw shouting at some police officers, and while the woman had seemed passionate in her pursuit of justice, she had not seemed much like a romantic hero. Foster was much more the stereotype; but his was not the name that had ended up in the spotlight.

Here, her face lit by the cold portable lights, Commander Shaw looked even less the hero: she looked haggard and tired, and her worried expression seemed etched into the lines of her face. But as Guanyin watched, the woman’s eyes hit Commander Keita, and her whole demeanor unwound in relief. Oblivious to Guanyin and her people, Shaw shoved her pulse rifle back over her shoulder and flung her arms around Keita. He embraced her in return, and Guanyin saw his eyes squeeze tightly shut. Shaw whispered something unintelligible, and for an instant, Keita’s lips widened into something almost like a smile.

Then she pulled away and turned to Guanyin, her expression once again professional. “Captain Shiang?”

Guanyin straightened. “Yes. Commander Shaw, I believe.”

Something passed across Commander Shaw’s face—chagrin, Guanyin thought, at being recognized. And then her gaze dropped, just for an instant, to Guanyin’s midsection. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but Guanyin thought she blushed.

They don’t have children on their ships, Chanyu had told her years ago, his voice disapproving. They are superstitious. Guanyin had not believed him.

Whatever the reasons for her reaction, Shaw regrouped quickly enough. She held out a hand, aware enough of PSI etiquette not to salute, and Guanyin took it. “We can start shifting anything that’s loose,” she said, her eyes scanning the wall. “Anything resists, leave it alone for now. Give me a few minutes to analyze the structural damage.”

Guanyin left her comm open, then pulled off her gloves, heading for the pile of debris. Behind her, she heard the slither of fabric as Cali and Aida pulled off their hoods and gloves. Cali was moving hesitantly—wary of Guanyin’s trusting nature, she suspected; Cali had always had a much larger dose of Chanyu’s skepticism—but Aida gamely stripped off his protective gear and lent his shoulder to the group. All the Corps soldiers were twice as wide as he was, but they moved aside and included him without comment. Guanyin moved in next to him, and she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Cali against the opposite wall, reaching for a collapsed beam along with Keita. Guanyin started at the bottom, shifting smaller pieces, while Commander Shaw ran a scanner along the ceiling.

They worked steadily in silence for what must have been a quarter of an hour, and then Commander Shaw took a step back. “Stay to the right,” she said. “Greg? Can you add some gravity units to the supply list? Once we’re clear we’re going to want to shut off Exeter’s gravity and work localized. There’s more structural damage here than we thought.”

The group shifted to one side, and Guanyin began pulling at larger pieces of debris. At one point she found a solid length of steel that, with Aida’s help, she was able to slide through the gap. Commander Shaw joined her on the other side, and the three of them levered a massive section of shattered bulkhead out of the way, revealing a meter-wide passage through the wreckage. Aiming her light, Guanyin stared anxiously into the opening beyond.

The gap opened onto the ruins of what had once been a large room, sparsely furnished. The interior walls had fallen in on themselves, table and chairs tossed around the room, in pieces on the floor.

And in one corner, against the wall, half under a massive tangle of sheet metal and electronic equipment, lay a very still Captain Raman Çelik.

Oblivious to the others, Guanyin stepped inside. She heard Commander Shaw’s light step behind her as she crouched down next to Çelik’s prone form. Focusing her light on him, she could see he was breathing, although his chest rose and fell too quickly, and she took a shaky breath. His appearance was appalling. His usually copper-warm skin had an undertone of gray, as if he had been rubbed with ash, and his right leg, trapped beneath the remains of a wall, was buried almost to his hip. There was a dark spot on his forehead, a mix of blood and bruise. “Xiao,” she snapped into her comm, “where are you?”

“Two minutes out, Captain,” Xiao said smoothly.

“Our doctor is on his way as well,” Foster said in her ear. “He’s alive?”

“He is.” Guanyin heard Shaw whisper to the others, and they began to clear the debris away from the opening, careful not to disturb the wreckage pinning Çelik down. He began to stir, and Guanyin thought if he could be roused, perhaps his head injury was not as bad as it looked. His eyes still closed, he moved his head, and his eyebrows twitched together. Pain, no doubt. She wondered how much he could feel of what was trapped under wreckage. She wondered how much he remembered of what had happened.

Guanyin crouched down, bringing her face level with his. “Captain Çelik,” she said, keeping her tone measured and formal. “Sir, you must wake up.”

Çelik coughed, then cleared his throat. He winced, eyes still closed; his senses were coming back. Out of the corner of her eye, Guanyin saw a pair of legs appear, and then Commander Shaw crouched down next to her.

“Captain,” Shaw said, her voice firm and sharp.

He opened his eyes. For a moment he looked at Shaw, unfocused, expression troubled and confused. Then he blinked, just once, and his eyes locked on Guanyin; and to her astonishment, he began to laugh.

“Well, fuck me,” he said, his voice rough and damaged. “I’ve been rescued by the child prodigy.”

Beside her, she felt Commander Shaw stiffen; but the relief she felt at the gibe was so intense she almost laughed herself. She fought to keep her expression neutral. “Do you know where you are, Captain?” she asked him.

He frowned irritably. “I’m in what’s left of Control,” he told her, “on my ship, the CCSS Exeter, which some execrable bastards who will soon be dying a slow and painful death have blown to pieces. I am forty-six years old, my mother’s name is Nadide, and you have five fingers on your left hand. Are you satisfied?”

“For the moment.” That was worrying; she would not have expected him to lose composure in front of her.

He blinked again, his eyes back on Shaw. “I know you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Shaw’s voice was so composed it might have come from a computer.

“You worked for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Didn’t they throw you out?”

“Not yet, sir.” There was no mistaking the hint of annoyance in her voice; but Çelik looked satisfied.

He looked past Shaw to take in the rest of the group. “Keita,” he said to his second-in-command, “what’s our status?”

“We’re still doing recon, sir,” Keita said. “Twenty-six enemy ships destroyed, one escaped, but Captain Shiang hit it with a tracker before it entered the field.”

Çelik’s eyes, all their sharp intelligence intact, snapped back to hers. “Can we follow them?”

She shook her head. “It is not an in-field tracker. We must wait until they emerge.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then our mission is complete, Captain.”

He looked discontented at that. “I’d get up and scan for the damn thing myself,” he growled, “but I seem to be immobilized. Any reason you pack of geniuses are standing there staring at me like I’m a garden gnome?”

Under other circumstances, she would have asked him what a garden gnome was. “We are waiting for Doctor Xiao,” she told him.

“Ah.” No gibes for Xiao, at least. His eyes stole away from hers, returning to Keita. “How many dead?”

“Internal comms are down, sir. We can’t be sure. We can’t even bring up the duty rosters to validate who was on duty down there.”

“Who’s on that?”

“Galileo has sent their comms people,” Keita told him.

“How many do we usually have on duty in the engine room?”

Keita paused. “Eighty-four, sir.”

Guanyin did not think any of the others were close enough to hear the hiss of the quick breath Çelik sucked in between his teeth. He turned his attention back to Shaw. “You’re still a mechanic, as I recall,” he said to her. “Tell me: Is this a rescue mission, or is it salvage?”

Guanyin wondered if the woman would lie to him. “Salvage, sir,” she said at last. “In my opinion.”

The last Guanyin recognized as a kindness. She thought Çelik would recognize it as such. He ignored the words, and turned back to Guanyin. “Captain, how many of your people have you got on board?”

“We have brought forty so far,” she told him. “Captain Foster has a similar number, I believe. I am bringing another hundred to clear the ship, and more when we are certain the raiders are gone.”

At that, his eyes went dark and tired, and for the first time in the ten years she had known him, Guanyin thought he looked old. “You won’t find anyone,” he said. “They got what they came for.”

Xiao came in then, quick and businesslike as if she were walking into her own infirmary, and stepped up next to Guanyin. She clucked down at Çelik. “You should have stayed away from the walls,” she told him, pulling out her medical kit.

“I’ll remember that next time,” he replied dryly. “What’s under that mess?”

Xiao frowned at the readout. “Your right leg is severed mid-calf,” she said, as if she was explaining an insect bite, “and your femur has a hairline fracture. You might do better to have it taken off at the hip. It would make for a cleaner joint when they grow you a graft.”

Guanyin felt her gut turn over, and she laid a hand instinctively on her round stomach. She had always found Xiao somewhat tastelessly matter-of-fact about these things, but under the circumstances she thought Çelik might appreciate the bluntness. Indeed, a grin stretched across his gray features. “For now,” he told Xiao, “I’d just as soon you leave me what parts are still attached.”

Xiao heaved a sigh; he was making her life more difficult. She turned to Guanyin, and switched out of Standard. “We’ll have to remove the debris quickly so I can cauterize the wound,” she said. “He may bleed out if I don’t. He might if I do, but it’s our only option. And he’s likely to pass out either way; the pain will be dreadful, even for a man like him. We’ll need to immobilize him.”

“Perhaps,” Çelik put in, speaking Standard, “one of these brave souls could prop me up.”

Guanyin had forgotten he could understand them. She took a step toward him, but next to her, Shaw spoke. “I’ll do it, Captain,” she said. Guanyin gave her a sharp look, and Commander Shaw must have guessed what she was thinking, because she softened her expression. “I outweigh you by a bit, I think,” she added. Guanyin nodded, willing herself to take a step back and trust that others could look after him as well as she could.

They cleared as much of the debris as they could without removing the lifesaving pressure from his wound, and then, at Xiao’s nod, Commander Shaw sat on the floor next to Captain Çelik, her back to him, bracing her feet against the wall. “On three,” Xiao said in dialect. “One—”

“Wait,” Guanyin said. She met Shaw’s eyes; it was clear the woman didn’t understand Xiao’s numbers. “I will count.”

She counted down in Standard, and when she finished, Keita—along with Cali, Aida, and the rest of the soldiers—heaved the remaining chunk of metal off of Çelik’s trapped leg. The captain made a brief, strangled sound through clenched teeth and then fell silent. Guanyin forced herself to look at his face rather than Xiao’s frantic ministrations. He was still gray, and with his eyes closed and his face slack he looked disturbingly vulnerable; but she could see him breathing, his chest rising and falling in shallow gasps. She caught herself breathing with him, and dug her fingernails into her palms, steadying herself. Xiao was a professional, and Çelik was strong, and she would have no more deaths today, thank you very much.

After interminable minutes, Xiao sat back. “That will hold,” she said, to Guanyin’s look. “The break was fairly clean, and he was burned as well. Without that, he would have bled out, even with the bulkhead cutting off his circulation.” She frowned at Çelik’s face. “His pressure is still lower than I’d like, but he’s better off unconscious right now. We should transport him.”

Guanyin nodded, and Xiao commed her team and began packing up her kit. Out of the corner of her eye, Guanyin saw Shaw looking from Xiao to Çelik and back again; but it was Captain Foster, listening in on the exchange, who spoke in her ear. “With respect, Captain, he should be transferred to Galileo.”

Guanyin had been expecting this objection. “Do you worry our medical team is inadequate?” she said icily. “Or do you believe we will harm him?”

She braced herself for more of Captain Foster’s paternalistic rubbish; but his tone stayed steadily professional, and she thought he had anticipated her objection as well. “He’ll want to be with his wounded people, Captain. And most of them will prefer the familiarity of another Corps starship.”

Damn. He’s right. Guanyin had been thinking about Çelik as an individual, not as a starship captain. That, and her own selfish worries. Chanyu’s voice echoed in her ear: It is how you make apologies that will show what sort of commander you are. “You are quite right, Captain Foster. Would you object to Doctor Xiao accompanying him?”

Guanyin caught something flicker through Shaw’s dark eyes; relief, perhaps. “No objection at all,” Captain Foster said. “And if she’s willing to stay and help, I’m sure our chief medical officer would be grateful for the extra hands.”

Galileo medics arrived, and to their credit they did not blink even once at the mixed crew tending Captain Çelik. Xiao spoke with them, and a few minutes later they carried Çelik, still unconscious, down the corridor on an anti-grav stretcher. Guanyin had to fight the urge to go with them. Perhaps she would find an excuse to visit later; she still had to ask what it was the raiders had taken away.

And she did not think she would feel easy until she heard him snipe at her again.

CHAPTER 5

C aptain Shiang is pregnant.

The corridors leading to the gap that had been the engineering section were largely intact, and Elena and her team were able to move quickly. She unrolled light strips methodically onto the walls as they progressed, all of her movements on autopilot. Such an odd thing to fixate on, the PSI captain’s round stomach; but with everything she had seen since the battle, that had been the most unexpected.

She felt herself growing angry with Greg. He should have known this; he should have warned her. But of course he would have no idea why such a thing would bother her, and it wasn’t like she was prepared to discuss it with him now. Too much had changed between them, and she was still too uncertain of what they had become. She might never find the right time to tell him.

Only once before had she seen a pregnant woman on a starship, and she hadn’t known it at the time. For those five days she had looked in the mirror each morning and noticed nothing different. Not until the pregnancy was lost and over had she known it had existed at all.

Stress, she told herself. This is all distraction. Set it aside, deal with it later. Remember why you’re here.

The damage to Exeter’s engineering section had been relatively contained, the ship’s modular structure keeping the adjacent corridors almost completely undamaged. They came across one section where the wall had gone missing, exposing the corridor to space; the ship’s environmental system had managed to extend oxygen over the breach, although not gravity. Elena let Darrow, the platoon leader, leap over first. The soldier then extended her arm and pulled the others over, one by one, with Elena last.