Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ music. Guanyin settled back onto the bed next to the patient puppy, wide-awake now and wagging his entire body, trying and failing to resist licking her face. “No, love,” she said sternly, and he backed off onto his haunches, waiting for her to change her mind.

      Cali pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. “Is this about the Corps captain?”

      “He talked to me like you do, sometimes. Like I’m helpless, or too young to understand. He seemed to think I would find him persuasive and comforting, just because he has a nice smile, never mind the volume of weapons his ship is carrying into our territory.”

      At that, Cali grinned. “Did you swear at him?”

      It was Guanyin’s turn to glower. “Why do you do it? When you know I understand all this better than you do. Why do you treat me like a child?”

      Cali shrugged and looked away. “Because I love you, I suppose, and I don’t like that things are hard for you. I want to do it for you, even when I can’t.”

      That was a surprisingly introspective observation for Cali. “Captain Foster doesn’t love me.”

      “Maybe you remind him of someone else.”

      “Maybe he thinks, because I’m new, I’m a fool.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. He dealt with Valeria Solomonoff in the Fifth Sector. You really think she let him get away with shit like this?”

      “Maybe she doesn’t like him, either.”

      “I spoke to her. She trusts him. She said, and I quote, ‘He is fighting what we are fighting.’ You know what she didn’t say?”

      “I wasn’t there, Guanyin.”

      “She didn’t say ‘He is a good soldier.’ So why is he talking to me as if there is nothing going on?”

      Cali leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “You know, Guanyin, you could ask him. I mean, instead of trying to analyze what Solomonoff really meant, or poking at my character flaws.”

      She sighed, gently tugging Samedi’s soft ears. “I was rude to him.”

      “They’re rude to us all the time, and they’ve still told one of their captains to kiss your ass.” Cali shrugged. “They want something. Find out what it is. Maybe we can get something in return.”

      Admittedly, that was not terrible advice. “What could they possibly want from us?”

      At her words, Samedi launched himself at her again, and she had to close her eyes against his silky-soft tongue. “Hopefully puppies,” Cali said dryly, and Guanyin laughed.

      The comm on her wall chimed, and Aida spoke without waiting for acknowledgment. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Captain Shiang,” he said, “but we’re receiving a distress call.”

      She could hear it in his voice: tension and fear. She sat up, her hand resting on Samedi’s head. “Acknowledge and reroute,” she told him, knowing he would have started the process already. “Who is it?”

      “It’s a Central starship, ma’am,” he said. “Captain—it’s Exeter.”

      She met Cali’s eyes. They had not seen Exeter in more than six months—since before Chanyu’s retirement—but they had run countless missions with her for a decade. She had thought to wonder, just that morning, why Central had not had Exeter arrange for her to meet Galileo’s captain, instead of expecting her to accept the goodwill of a stranger. She wondered if Captain Çelik was still at Exeter’s helm.

      She wondered if he was all right.

      “What are they up against?” She swung her feet to the floor and stood, all her fatigue washed away by adrenaline.

      “Syndicate ships, Captain. They’re reporting twenty-seven.”

      Twenty-seven raiders. Against a Central starship. “How close are we?”

      “Two minutes, eight seconds, ma’am.”

      “Get all weapons online,” she told him. “Orunmila, call battle stations ship-wide.”

      The lights shifted to blue, and the quiet, repeating alarm came over the ship’s public comm system. Cali fell into step behind her as she rushed out of her quarters into the hallway.

      Raiders were often reckless—and occasionally suicidal—but attacking Central was a recent tactic. There had been three attacks over the last six months, always the usual smash-and-grab, and only one had been at all successful. So many raiders against a single starship … the Syndicates were never so bold. An attack so aggressive was insanity. Even if they scored against Exeter, who was well armed in her own right, Central could not let the attack stand. This battle, whatever the cause, was only the start, and the Syndicates had to know that.

      She thought again of Galileo’s abrupt appearance, and wondered how much Central had known in advance.

       CHAPTER 2

       Galileo

      Took on parts at Lakota, Greg Foster wrote. Four days’ travel en route to Shixin. Fucked up the latest negotiations with PSI.

      No. It was not the sort of report he would be allowed to file.

      He swept a finger through the offending paragraph to delete it and stared, frustrated, at the nearly empty document. Realistically, writing the report should have taken no more than half an hour—less if he wrote in generalities—but he was fairly certain insufficient detail would cause Admiral Herrod to bounce the report right back with orders to do it over. Even with a proper level of information, though, he would need to take some care with his word choice. Allowing his frustration to bleed through onto the page would not help his shaky standing with the Admiralty.

      Looking back on his conversation with the PSI captain, he couldn’t blame her for being suspicious. Galileo was hardly a stealth ship—even before the blowup last year, Greg’s ship and her crew had kept a fairly high profile in the squabble-ridden Fourth Sector. And their first foray into the Fifth Sector had involved a set of incidents that had almost provoked all-out war between Central and the PSI ships in that region. He had known Galileo’s precipitous deployment to the Third Sector, done without so much as a polite forewarning for the non-Corps ships in the area, was likely to be misinterpreted. What he hadn’t quite understood was how little his experiences in the Fifth Sector would matter here.

      Shiang Guanyin, captain of the PSI ship Orunmila, had viewed Galileo’s arrival with hair-trigger paranoia, and he could not blame her. But even so, he had been surprised to find himself so far unable to open any kind of dialogue with her at all.

      “Thank you for the introduction,” she had said, her Standard enunciated carefully. “Should we find ourselves requiring anything at all from you or your government, we will let you know.” And she had terminated the comm.

      He did not have to review his diplomatic training to recognize she felt insulted, and by more than Galileo’s presence. СКАЧАТЬ