Remnants of Trust

She wondered if, under ordinary lights and populated by a working crew, she would find the halls familiar. She had spent a year of her life here, the turns and levels becoming second nature. But after almost eight years away, she found most of her memories were emotional: her hideous naiveté when she arrived, so certain that she had found her path, that she would serve out her career on board this ship; her realization that the hazing and the insults and the subtle acts of subversion were not an initiation, that Captain Çelik preferred his people insecure and off-balance. Less than six months into her first, coveted deployment, she had begun to search for a way off the ship.

And then Canberra had happened, and all her priorities had changed.

They walked the perimeter of the wreckage, alert for intruders; but all they found were more of Exeter’s crew. They stumbled on nearly three dozen of them, mostly techs and medical staff, holed up in an interior space, shivering in the dark and awaiting news. Greg promised to send a team for them, but Elena traded one of her infantry for a medic and left them behind with some of her temporary lights. Purely psychological, leaving them with one soldier; but in their place, she thought she would want the reminder that they were not in danger anymore. And she was hoping she would need the medic with her team.

But the others they found were beyond help.

They came across a group of six who had all been burned, a quick, white-hot flash leaving them unrecognizable. Elena wanted to scan them herself, wanting to know if she recognized a name; but she realized, as Exeter’s medic knelt before them, that they were not her dead. She watched as he slipped a gloved hand behind their burn-contorted necks to scan their ident chips. There was nothing in the charred flesh, in the holes where the eyes had evaporated, that the medic could have recognized.

“We’ll collect them,” he asked her, rising to his feet, “won’t we?”

He was a little shorter than she was, and roughly the same age. She wondered if her eyes, like his, looked centuries old.

“All of them,” she told him. He nodded, and they moved on.

The limpet had left a shuttle-sized hole in the wall of the corridor. Exeter’s automated system had done a good job of sealing out the vacuum, but managing a space that size would drain the batteries far too quickly. “Captain,” she said, “we’re going to want generators. A lot of them. It’s going to take some time to seal this.” Regardless of what she had told Çelik, she wasn’t ready yet to give the ship up as lost.

There was a pause on the comm, and she tensed. “Shimada is pulling some equipment together,” he said. “I’ll have him add generators to the list.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Not on an open comm, Commander.”

Her first response was annoyance—why does he always pull rank when I ask something important?—and then she realized what he was saying: he had received confirmation from the Admiralty. They would not be sealing the breach. Her list of damaged equipment would be listed as salvage, and Exeter would be scrapped. It would have been obvious to anyone who was thinking clearly, but now was not the time to say it out loud.

“Exeter can hold the vacuum out for a few hours yet,” she told him. Without waiting for him to give the order, she turned to Darrow. “I’m heading out. Sweep this area, and get any survivors behind the central bulkhead. Once we’re sure it’s clear, we can expose this section.”

If Darrow had put together the implications, she kept her reaction to herself. She nodded to Elena, and led the rest of the infantry down the hall toward the brig.

Elena checked the seals of her environmental suit, and stepped forward to the blown-out hole. She could see vestiges of quick-drying foam sealant around the torn metal edges of the opening. It would have been easy enough to modify a standard consumer-model shuttle to secrete foam on impact; it would be a simple inversion of a land-model safety feature. Easy enough—low-tech, even—to make the shuttle a missile to punch through an exposed interior wall and create an airtight seal.

Somewhat less refined than the fleet of advanced fighter drones, but much more in keeping with the inept piloting of the drone that had hit the ship.

She attached her tether to the interior wall and stepped through the hole, feeling a familiar lurch as she shifted out of the gravity field, and a strange sense of claustrophobia as her suit’s interior began generating its own heat. Keeping one hand on the edge of the blown-out opening, she looked up and down the ship’s exterior.

From a distance, she had seen Exeter’s build structure, all arched ribs and level separators at right angles. Up close it was chaos: scrap metal, polymers, and fiber, burned and torn as if some massive animal had pulled it apart in a rage. She reached out and tugged at a line; it came loose, and when she pinched it between her fingers it turned to dust.

Too much heat, she thought. “This is more than just a short-range generator explosion,” she told Greg.

“Can you identify it?”

She pushed off along the hull toward another cluster of fiber. “I expect so. Standard incendiaries will leave residue.” She took a handful of lines in her fist and tugged experimentally; these were less decayed. She pulled more steadily, and they came away from the hull. “If the drone had some kind of hybrid battery—son of a bitch!”

Reflexively she released her clutch of fibers and pushed away from the hull. What she had pulled away from the interior was a body, bloated and unrecognizable, its exterior covered in a thin sheen of ice. Regrouping, she tugged on her tether and brought herself closer to it, closing her hand around its arm to keep it from drifting free.

“Chief?” She became aware that Greg had been calling her name repeatedly.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, as steadily as she could. “I believe I’ve run across one of the enemy.”

Up close she could make out more details. The clothing it was wearing was dark brown, thick and sturdy cloth, but nothing like an environmental suit. Not a Corps uniform, which meant it was one of the raiders. Some kind of infiltrator caught in the blast? Piloting one of the ships she had thought was a drone? She tugged him forward, examining the alcove she had pulled him out of. She could see nests of fibers and polymer sheets moved to one side. The body had been shoved there after the blast. And from the look of the remains … he had been alive when he had been exposed to the vacuum.

She hooked her arm through his rigid elbow and pulled on her tether, hauling herself back through the opening. The abrupt gravity yanked the body from her grip, and she caught at him, unable to prevent him from dropping, stiff and undignified, to the floor. She stepped over him, leaning against the wall.

“I’m not a medic, but it sure looks like death by decompression,” she told Greg. “If he hasn’t got an ident chip, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting a name.”

“Don’t go back out there alone, Chief,” he said. “That’s an order.”

An emotional one, she thought, then looked down at the corpse. Inhuman, at this stage, distorted and hideous.

Murderer.

“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged. She was far too close to all of this, and Greg knew it, too.

“Chief?” Darrow said. “You inside?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Aft. By the brig. We found two more bodies, ma’am, one raider, and one of Exeter’s people, but we’ve got one alive. One of ours. Looks like he was guarding the brig, but it’s been blasted open.”

She began heading down the hallway. “Had it been inhabited?”

“Hard to tell, and the officer isn’t talking yet.”

She rounded the corner, and came across the raider first. Despite being free of the ravages of the vacuum, he was, in his brown uniform, as nondescript as the other one. She put his age at something between thirty and forty, but his slack skin was already sinking into his cheekbones. He could have been much younger. His features were neutral to the point of blandness: regular, symmetrical, echoes of a dozen different ethnicities easily projected onto his bone structure. She wondered if he’d had himself altered to be ordinary, or if his ability to blend in had led him to a life of theft and rootlessness.

No way to ask him now.

He had taken a shot directly in the sternum, and his chest had collapsed with the impact. She wondered if it had been a quick death, if he had blacked out and felt no pain. She hoped not.

She stepped over him to the other body, sprawled out on the deck, staring sightlessly upward, her unlined face forever stilled. Young. Maybe new. Maybe not even out here a year. This was not what she would have hoped for when she chose her deployment, the ship on which she would live her entire life.

Beyond her, Elena saw Darrow and the medic crouched before another soldier, slumped against the wall. Elena knelt down with the others. He was a sturdily built man around her own age, breathing but unconscious; the medic was administering something with a dermal patch.

The man shifted and his eyelids fluttered, and she felt her heart thumping against her chest. She took a quick look at his uniform. “Lieutenant. Can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me.”

A small sound pushed its way through his lips. If the ship had not been so cavernously silent, she would not have heard him.

“Come on,” she entreated. Cautiously she extended a hand and touched his arm; he shifted again.

“… sorry …” he murmured. His eyes opened, staring at nothing.

“Lieutenant, do you know where you are?”

“Sydney,” he said. His unfocused gaze had wandered to the dead woman.

“Is that her name?”

He swallowed. “Dead now.”

“I know, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

He did not respond, just kept his eyes focused over her shoulder. “Sorry,” he said again; and as she watched, his eyes grew damp.

She rubbed his arm, helpless. “Just hang on. Help is coming.”

He shook his head. “No help.”

We came as fast as we could, she thought; but that was her excuse, and it gave him nothing. She kept her hand on his arm, hoping the contact would give him something to focus on, a reason to fight back.

“Who is it?”

Greg’s voice in her ear, normal and familiar. The medic responded. “Lieutenant Farias,” he said. “He took plasma fire. I think it was either him or Sydney who took out the raider.”

“Ask him if the raider was the one in the brig,” Greg said.

The medic gave Elena a look, but shifted to one side so she could question the injured man. “Lieutenant Farias, were you and Sydney on duty? Was there a raider in your brig?”

But he had started closing his eyes again, and she could not be sure he had understood her. “No help,” he said again. “I’m sorry, Sydney.” And he fell unconscious once more.

Elena stood and moved away, letting the medic tend to him. She could not see where he had been shot, and she wondered instead if he had been beaten, if he had taken a blow to the head. “Did you get that?” she asked Greg.

“Not much to get,” he observed. “Will he live?”

Elena, who had not had the heart for such bluntness, looked at the medic, who nodded. “Can’t say for sure,” he equivocated aloud. “The concussion is pretty bad, but he’s got no fractures. As long as he doesn’t fall into a coma, he should recover in a few days.”

“Not sooner?” Greg asked.

The medic’s lips thinned with disapproval. “You want guarantees, Captain, you won’t get them from me,” he said shortly.

Greg was silent for a moment. “Chief, on a private line, please.” When she changed over, he said, “Are you okay there?”

She knew what he meant. “I’m better off here than home chewing on it,” she replied. “I want to get through this debris, and bring home some evidence.”

It was Greg’s turn to be silent, and she could see his face in her mind, knowing something was going on with her, uncertain of what he should do about it. Kindness. So often kindness from him, these days. She wished she could trust it.

In the end, he let it go. “All right, Chief,” he told her. “Carry on.”

She waited until they came to carry the injured lieutenant away, and then she reattached her tether and went back outside alone.

CHAPTER 6

Ted,” Jessica asked, “are you afraid of the dark?”

She was kneeling on the floor, running her magnetic scanner over Exeter’s data core, looking for echoes of information. The explosion that had taken out three levels and the entire engine room had sent a shock of heat and current through the system that had effectively shut it down, leaving nothing but the ship’s autonomic functions in place. There was no dynamic data scanning, no seeking, no sorting; she had to read the raw data off the core and feed it to Galileo for analysis. Next to her, Emily Broadmoor, her old boss and a damn good hacker in her own right, had nearly finished patching through the base comm system, so at least Exeter’s internal messaging system would work, after a fashion. With the ship’s brain offline, though, routing would be crude, there would be no records of anything, and the crew would have to route through Galileo for any kind of external services. Stone Age tech.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Ted’s voice said in her ear.

She was transferring the echoes to Ted on Galileo, who was matching them up with Exeter’s last known data dump. With some luck, he would be able to help her pinpoint the weapons data, to see if there had been a malfunction. Greg had been talking about it as a given, but it would be a double-edged sword if she found something. Evidence of malfunction would exonerate deceased gunners; but it would open up an avenue none of them wanted to have to explore.

“That’s bullshit,” she retorted. She frowned at her scanner and slowed it down; the information was patchy here, and she did not want to miss any. God, this job is going to take days. “You’re afraid of the captain.”

“A healthy respect for authority isn’t fear. That bit there, Jess—stop for a second.”

She sat while he waited for Galileo to chew on the data. “I was always afraid of the dark,” she confessed.

“You picked the wrong career,” he said. “Okay, keep going.”

“What was that?”

“Battery information, about three days old. We’re getting closer.”

Gently she nudged the scanner forward. “We’d get these long winter nights at home,” she went on. “Dark twice as long as it was light. When I was little, I figured if someone got sick in the daytime, they might live; but if they got sick at night, they’d never recover.”

“Have you ever considered therapy, Jess?”

“If you looked at the statistics,” she reasoned, “more people got sick at night just because the nights were longer, so more of them died. The correlation was meaningless, of course; but I was a kid.”

He paused, catching on. “You still superstitious?”

“I want,” she told him, carefully teasing apart a particularly dense chunk of information, “to be back home in my room with the lights on, getting very drunk with someone lovely and very, very alive.” She sat back, rubbing her eyes. “You should see this place, Ted. It’s a crypt.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Nearly a hundred dead, at least. How else can you look at it?”

“Like the ones who survived were pretty damn lucky. What do you think would have happened if that PSI ship had been further out?”

She thought back to the battle, watching the schematic at Greg’s side, hoping he could not see her shaking. He had appeared level and composed through the whole thing. She wondered if that was something that could be learned, or if he just went cold in a crisis—if that was something unique to him. Jessica never went cold in a crisis. “I don’t ever want to be captain, Ted,” she said.

Ted was apparently accustomed to her random changes of subject. “Given how bad he is at staying out of trouble, you may have a problem.”

“That was only once.”

“And you had to save his ass. And then he promoted you.”

“He’s a bastard.”

“You’re the one who works with him all day; you’d know better than I would.” He made a sound. “That’s it, Jess. Weapons systems. Get me everything you can preserve, as dense as you can get it.”

She spent the next half hour sorting through the magnetic shadows and memory imprints of the blocks Ted specified. She did not even have to lay it all out sequentially to see the pattern: the excision of information, the lobotomizing of the weapons systems’ connection to the ship’s larger mind. And at the end of it, fragments of something else: a personal bio key, obscuring a shattered block of indecipherable commands Exeter had not survived to execute.

This was careful damage, done with thought, entirely different from the randomized destruction of heat and pulse waves. And it had been done much earlier.

“What do you think, Ted?” she asked. “Sixteen hours?”

“No more than seventeen, for sure,” he replied. “Didn’t their flight plan have them in the field seventeen hours ago?”

Despite its size, Exeter’s massive stellar batteries ensured it could travel for long stretches in the field. Elena had told her once, but Jessica could not remember. “What’s she rated for?” she asked Ted.

“Nineteen hours, but she’s done twenty-one without turning a hair,” he recalled. “Shit, Jess.”

Ted was not one to curse, but this time she was not surprised. The implication was clear to her as well. “Had to be someone on board.”

“What about a delayed payload? Could someone have coded something like this?”

She frowned at the system. “Possibly,” she allowed. “I’ll have to take a closer look. But I don’t think so, Ted. The timing would have had to be just right, or someone would have discovered it as part of a maintenance run or a drill. You don’t just hack a payload into a Central starship. It’d be hard even for me.”

He was quiet for a moment. “But someone did. And people died, Jess. Someone did this, and did it on purpose. Someone they knew.”

She thought back over her career, over her schooling, over her early life on a planet where fully half of the children she knew had died before the age of fourteen. “Knowing someone,” she told him, “doesn’t mean they won’t fuck you over.”

Greg asked the same question Ted had. “How much skill would it take to seed something like this to execute later?”

She was leaning against the wall, eyes closed, head aching from staring at small pieces of data for hours. Emily had brought the emergency lights online, and they had given Jessica some energy, but they could not erase eye strain. “Given enough prep time,” she said, “I might be able to code something, although I don’t think I’d bet my life—let alone my career—on the thing working. The Admiralty might have someone, though.” She thought of Shadow Ops, but did not bother reminding him of the skillsets present in that organization.

He knew more of those details than she did.

“How hard would it be for someone to do it in person?”

“Not hard. They’d need command codes and a little knowledge of weapons systems, but that’s it.”

He paused, and she imagined him rubbing his eyes. He is going to be very nearsighted someday. “Have you got enough left to find out whose command code was used?”

At last, an easy answer—but not one she wanted to give him. “No, sir. All the analytical memory is gone. Volatile storage doesn’t even have echoes left. I found a partial bio key that was probably intended to wipe the evidence after the fact, but there’s not enough to attempt a match.” She fought a wave of depression. “We can’t find out, sir. The information is just not there.”

Another pause, then: “Okay.” He had regrouped, just in those few seconds. “I want you back on Galileo. Get in touch with the Admiralty—Herrod, if you can get him, but otherwise anyone but Waris—and get this area quarantined. We’ll need another ship for the wounded, but I want it clear this is a crime scene. Get him to agree to that.”

“You think he will?”

“If he doesn’t,” Greg said grimly, “that tells us something right there. After you’ve talked to him, get a crew over here to finish the core analysis.”

She felt a bubble of indignation. “Sir—” she began.

“Jessica.” His voice was gentle, the way it got when he was about to tell her she was an idiot. “Is this job so delicate that you’re the only one who can do it?”

“Are you telling me I’m replaceable?”

“I’m telling you you’re the second-in-command, and you need to delegate, because you’re not at all replaceable and right now I need you. Pick some people you trust, and get them on the job.”

“I don’t trust anyone.” That wasn’t precisely true. Emily had some damn good crypto people. None as good as Jessica was, but hadn’t she just been thinking that what this job needed most was patience? “It feels wrong, sir,” she confessed, “passing this off on someone else.”

“I know.” And that, of course, was the worst part: he did. “But right now that’s your duty, Commander. We have good people. Trust them to do their jobs.”

Within a few minutes, she was able to find a space on a shuttle back to Galileo, and she sat in silence next to a half dozen of Exeter’s crew, all with minor abrasions, all somber and still. None of them seemed inclined to look at her, and she felt that strange indignation again. Who am I to be heading home, to my bright room and my well-lit corridors and all the people I love? Why do I deserve that peace, when these people have lost everything in the space of a few minutes? Because they had to know they would never be going back to Exeter. She wondered if they would have the chance to retrieve their possessions, and she resolved, if she had the power, to make sure they were given the time.

She wanted to talk to Elena. Elena always let her rant, and never tried to slow her down or tell her she was being silly. Elena was one of a very few people who had ever seen her cry. But Elena would be handling her own raft of shit right now—or, rather, avoiding it. She was just like Greg that way: she went stony, handling what was in front of her, all emotion shoved aside. But unlike Greg, the emotion eventually caught up with her, and she would flame out in a burst of grief and rage, days, sometimes weeks later.

Greg swallowed everything. Elena held on until she flew apart. As much as Jessica admired them both, neither was teaching a lesson she wanted to learn.

CHAPTER 7

Galileo

Nearly seven hours later, Elena finally flew home.

It had occurred to her, during the fifth hour she was floating outside going over the burned-out remains of Exeter’s decking, that she ought to pass the task off to someone else. Someone uninvolved, who had not been awake for twenty-five hours. But there was something in her that wanted the worst of it laid out starkly before her, so she could get on with the anger and grief and move beyond it. She hoped if she stared point-blank at the horror long enough, she could jolt her way past the leaden numbness in her stomach.

Everyone on the shuttle with her was ambulatory, the worst of the casualties having been moved hours earlier, and once she landed she left them to disembark on their own. She had it in her mind to head for her room and a long hot shower, but the halls were full of strangers. Exeter’s crew. Based on the crowds, possibly all of them. Cassia was still hours off, and she suspected her room, along with most of the rooms on Galileo, had been commandeered to be used as temporary quarters.