Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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СКАЧАТЬ words to Elena, she had only said, “Where does he think we would go?”

      She was watching him now through the steam from her tea. “You should have Jessie do it for you,” she told him.

      “She doesn’t write like me.”

      “You think Herrod gives a damn?”

      “Why don’t you ask her to do yours?”

      She gave him a mock glare. “You promoted her over me, remember?”

      “Okay, then get Galileo to do it.”

      “Which is not a terrible idea,” she agreed, “apart from the fact that Galileo wouldn’t write like me at all.”

      “So we can’t get around this,” he concluded, resigned.

      She set the mug down on the desk. “Thirty minutes, no talking, we knock these out and we’re done with it.”

      “And promise ourselves not to leave it to the last minute next month.”

      She grinned. “That too.”

      They both fell silent, and Greg returned to figuring out how to describe his discussions with PSI. He wrote and erased the section of his report four times, aware he was attracting Elena’s attention. At last he leaned back, frustrated. “I don’t know how to say this,” he said.

      “What have you got?”

      “I just deleted it.” At her look, he added, “I can’t just tell him ‘I said this, and she said that.’ I know Herrod. He’s not going to give me any leeway, not in an official document. The man doesn’t like me.”

      “It’s not personal. The man is doing a job, just like you are.” When he said nothing, she extended a hand toward his document. “Let me try.”

      “You don’t write like me, either.”

      “So wordsmith it when I’m done.”

      He let her tug the document to her side of the desk, watching her set her own aside. She read his last paragraph and frowned, then wrote rapidly for a moment. When she was finished, she pushed the document back over to him.

      He read. “This is a lie.”

      “It is not.”

      “Negotiations are not ‘ongoing.’ I’m trying to figure out how I could possibly respond to her without sounding like an asshole.”

      “The most important thing about diplomacy,” Elena said, “is not the goal. It’s establishing communication. You’ve done that.” He glared, and she shook her head. “How can you be such a good diplomat, and so lousy at managing your own chain of command?”

      “I’m not a good diplomat. That’s the problem.” But he reread her words. They were not bad. He reached in and reordered a phrase—she had nailed his voice pretty well. If you use this, he reminded himself, you can be finished. “Herrod will peg this for bullshit.”

      “Of course he will.” She had turned back to her own work. “He’s a bright person. But you’ll have made the effort to spin it, and that’s what he wants.” She made a few notes, then sat back. “There.”

      “You wrote up three weeks already?”

      She shrugged. “I’m a mechanic. My life is much less interesting than yours.”

      “Plus Admiral Waris likes you.”

      Elena’s supervisor, Ilona Waris, had been a mechanics teacher when Elena was at Central’s military academy on Earth, and Elena’s aptitude had rapidly secured her place as the teacher’s favorite. Waris had kept track of Elena’s career, occasionally offering unsolicited advice, but Greg had always had the sense that Elena found the woman overbearing. Elena had no ambition—she would not even have been chief if Galileo’s old chief hadn’t been killed—but she had enough political savvy to keep from completely rebuffing Waris’s sporadic attempts to keep in touch.

      Elena had paused, and was looking at him, her expression troubled. “She voted to acquit us,” she said.

      “Is that bad?”

      “She said … how did she put it? ‘Your careers shouldn’t be hamstrung over one bad call in the field.’ ”

      Bad call. He could tell from her expression she disagreed with the term as much as he did. “You think she’s on the other side?”

      The other side meant Shadow Ops, an organization within Central’s official government that wielded far more power than most people knew. S-O had been knee-deep in the events that had ended with their trial. Not that they could prove any of it, of course. All of the physical evidence was gone, and S-O’s public face was one of benign, largely ineffective bureaucracy. But they both knew differently, and he knew she was aware of the implications of Admiral Waris’s statement. Acquittal would have meant Central could have sent them off anywhere, unsupervised. They could have been separated, isolated from each other, alone with their suspicions and without resources to pursue them. Or they could have vanished without a trace, just a couple of random, unrelated accidents, and no one would even have asked the question.

      “I think,” Elena told him, “that presuming on an old acquaintance would be incalculably foolish. So I will be a boring mechanic in my reports, and she can check off a box, and she and I can smile at each other with our fingers crossed behind our backs.”

      Trust was the biggest casualty of the events of the last year. Elena, despite her years of experience in the Corps, used to trust her superiors to be in the right, at least as far as their intentions were concerned. The loss was a small one, he suspected, but it was a loss all the same, on the heels of far too many others. “Elena,” he began, “you know I—”

      A high tone sounded, and the wall readout flashed red. He stood, but across from him Elena was already moving, sweeping away both of their documents with a wave of her hand and pulling up a tactical view of Galileo. Out the window the field dimmed and dissipated into stars, and they hung still for a moment as the ship changed their flight plan. Then the stars blurred and they were in the field again, and if he had not heard the alarm he would have thought nothing had changed.

      A priority Central distress call.

       All ships in the vicinity, help us.

      “Status,” he said tersely. Above his desk, his ship rendered a reconstructed tactical display of a starship similar in design to Galileo, only three times the size: a great sprawling eagle rather than a sparrow. The CCSS Exeter. He stole a glance at Elena, who was staring at the display, her jaw set. In addition to being the Corps ship that had patrolled the Third Sector the longest, Exeter had been Elena’s first deployment. She still knew people who served there.

      Emily Broadmoor, Greg’s chief of security and infantry commander, entered the room as Galileo gave status. “CCSS Exeter reports being under attack by twenty-seven Syndicate raiders. Current readings count twenty.”

      Twenty-seven. He could not recall ever hearing of a Syndicate tribe so large.

      “Additional СКАЧАТЬ