Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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       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.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ