Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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СКАЧАТЬ had considered more than once just telling her the truth: that Galileo’s presence had nothing to do with PSI, or even the resource issues in the Third Sector. Central was indeed spread too thin, the supply chains delivering raw materials for construction having been constrained for years; but Galileo had been reassigned for an entirely different reason. He could tell Captain Shiang, he supposed, that he was only there so his superiors could make sure he remembered who called the shots. But he did not think that would inspire confidence in either him or Central Gov.

       Although it would certainly torpedo what’s left of my career.

      Weary of his mind running in circles, he rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger and let his attention drift to the window. There were no stars for him to contemplate, just the silver-blue brightness of the FTL field moderated by Galileo’s polarizers. They would be in the field another three hours before they stopped to recharge, and another five days before finally reaching their supply pickup. If he finished this damn report, he could enjoy some peace and quiet for a change. The last six months had been, in some ways, the most eventful of his fourteen-year career.

      There was the court-martial and its outcome, of course, about which he was still not sure what to think. What had happened the year before had been too public for the Admiralty to cover up, and they had struggled to come up with charges that reflected the seriousness of the events but didn’t alienate a public that seemed inclined to see both Greg and Elena as heroes. In the end they were charged with insubordination and destruction of government property, although the public record of the trial was coy about exactly what that property had been.

      The final verdict—splitting hairs over specific charges, making them appear to be something between naively innocent and subversively guilty—had turned out to be strangely toothless. He and Elena had been taken off the promotion lists—her for a year, him for two—and they had each been assigned their own personal admiral with whom they were required to file monthly mission reports for the next half year. The most concrete changes were Galileo’s reassignment from her usual Fourth Sector patrol to the Third Sector, and the deployment of a dozen recent Academy graduates who probably shouldn’t have made it past their first year.

      Which meant that, yes, they had been sent a message. Just not one that made sense to Greg. Anyone who thought subtle insults would alter either his or her conviction that they had done exactly the right thing was unfamiliar with both of them to the point of absurdity.

      But it was more than his professional life that had changed. For the first time in thirteen years—since he had deployed at the arrogant, self-assured age of twenty-four—he was unmarried and unattached, and he had not considered the impact that would have on his day-to-day life. There had always been people who saw his marriage as a challenge rather than a deterrent, but its absence had brought him a whole new population of admirers that he had no idea how to properly deflect. His usual techniques were not as effective on this crowd, and he often found himself caught flat-footed while trying to let someone down kindly. Having a wife had provided a buffer between him and the natural impulses of a crew that spent months in close quarters. He had been working to include himself more in their day-to-day lives, and many of them seemed happy to welcome him in without limits.

      Jessica Lockwood, his newly minted second-in-command, had tried to explain it to him. “They’re just happy for you, sir,” she had told him, as if that explained everything. Jessica always put him in mind of his sister: practical and irrepressible, indulgent with what she perceived to be his shortcomings. Jessica would never come right out and tell him he was an emotional idiot, but he was pretty sure she thought it frequently.

      And then there were the people who expressed sympathy about his divorce—which he found equally puzzling. He did not doubt their intentions, but he did not understand how they could so thoroughly misread how he felt. Even Jessica tiptoed around the subject of Caroline, as if his ex-wife were a land mine or a raw nerve. In truth, he almost never thought of her, all the pain and resentment of their fourteen-year marriage having vanished for him even before the dissolution was finalized. Most days he felt light, more buoyant than he had felt since he was a child, and nobody seemed to notice.

      Well, almost nobody.

      Resigning himself to the impulse, he engaged his comm in text mode. “You up?” he asked.

      A brief pause, and the word Yes appeared in the air half a meter before his eyes.

      “You done yet?”

       No.

      He shouldn’t ask. He had no business asking. Things between them had not yet healed. “You want to come finish here?”

      A longer pause this time. Then: Do you have tea?

      “I will by the time you get here.”

      She rang the door chime when she arrived. This was a regression—for years she had walked into his office unannounced, confident of her welcome. But showing up at all … that was progress. Glacial and frustrating, but progress.

      He had Galileo open the door, and his chief of engineering walked in. Elena Shaw, his closest friend before he had blown it all up, still the person he trusted above anyone else. He had thought, for years, that what he felt for her was complicated, designed to trip him up when he least expected it. For a time, he had thought her presence was a curse. It was only recently, when faced with losing her, that he had recognized what he felt for her was simple. What was complicated was coping with it.

      Oblivious to his ruminating, she dropped into the chair across from him and wrapped her fingers around the mug of hot tea. “So how far did you get?” she asked.

      She was watching him with those eyes of hers, sharp and perceptive and bright with intelligence. Also dark and beautiful and so easy to get lost in. She was not pretty the way many of the women on his ship were pretty: her features were too uneven, the balance thrown off by her huge eyes and substantial nose. But there was an elegance about her, the way she moved, the way she spoke, as if she were some creature of earth and fire, liquid and molten. He often thought he could spend the rest of his days quite happily doing nothing but watching her.

      In fact, he had said this to his father when he had visited last month. The older man had shaken his head, and said it was a damn good thing Greg had gotten divorced.

       More proof he knows me better than I thought he did.

      “Through last week,” he replied to Elena’s question.

      She rolled her eyes, leaning back and lifting the mug close to her face. “I’m three weeks behind,” she confessed. “I have too much work to do for this shit.”

      “It’s not about the report. It’s about reminding us who’s the boss.”

      She knew that, of course. They had discussed the outcome at the time, and both understood the court-martial could have ended quite differently. The Admiralty would have been well within its rights to throw them out of the service entirely—saving the sector be damned. They hadn’t, and the one conclusion he and Elena had come up with was that the Admiralty simply couldn’t agree on what to do with them. “Some of them wanted to give you a medal,” Admiral Herrod had told Greg shortly after the trial’s conclusion. “Some of them wanted to separate the two of you.” At that the old man had frowned, and for a moment Greg had the impression that the typically circumspect admiral was speaking entirely off the record. “Whatever else you do, Foster—don’t let them separate you. And watch your back.”

      It was СКАЧАТЬ