LITMIR.BIZ

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windowed walls, his back to the open engine room outside. Ted never sat at his desk. Ever since he had been appointed chief of engineering, he had used the office, but never sat in the chair. He hadn’t said so, but she knew in his mind it was Elena’s. Of course, it might also have been Ted’s endless kinetic energy—he was not big on sitting at the best of times—but given how his teeth set every time someone called him Chief, she didn’t think that was the main reason.

      “Stabilized, Bob says,” she replied. “If he were one of us, Bob would already have cut him loose. As it is, he wants to sit on him until Budapest has to leave.”

      “So he’s worried.”

      “I think cautious is probably more accurate.” Or, she thought, possibly territorial. For a cynical old man, Bob became deeply possessive of his patients, especially those who had been badly hurt. “If he was worried, he’d tell Bear to delay their next drop and stick around. I’m not so sure Bear won’t do it anyway.”

      Ted was watching her curiously. “This kind of worrying familiar to you, Jessie?”

      She met his eyes as neutrally as she could. “More than I’d like it to be,” she admitted. Ted knew her too well. “Ted, you’ve been around a bit.”

      “You’ve been listening to gossip again, haven’t you?”

      She ignored him. “Did you ever run into this Commander Ilyana?”

      He shook his head. “Never dealt with Chryse directly,” he said. “But one of the guys I originally deployed with—he’s out on Borissova now—did an airlift with Chryse’s help. Said they were unbelievably well organized, but otherwise kind of rude.”

      “Not surprising, PSI being PSI.”

      “That’s why I remember him remarking on it. They must have been really unpleasant.”

      Which was not unusual in isolation. But Jessica thought of Greg, and his reaction to Captain Bayandi. Greg was both curious and mistrustful of the man, and she did not think he would be so concerned if Bayandi had behaved with PSI’s typical coolness.

      She shoved aside her research, giving Galileo a chance to digest more records. “Did you get anything on that artifact yet?” she asked.

      For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to let her change the subject. But then he pushed himself off the wall and began to pace in front of her. “So what we’ve got there,” Ted told Jessica, “is an enigma.”

      “Haven’t you scanned it?”

      “Oh yes. I scanned it from every possible angle with everything we’ve got.” He shook his head. “It’s shielded. No matter what I point at it, I get a happy little NO DATA back from the system. So whatever it is, it’s got better tech than we have, which does not please me.”

      It did not please Jessica, either. Better tech almost certainly meant Ellis.

      “But the other side of it,” he added, “is that it didn’t actually do anything.”

      Jessica raised her eyebrows. “What about Lanie’s message?”

      “It’s not a message.” He leaned across her and hit a panel on the desk. A waveform appeared in the air, and he reached his fingers into the image and pulled it apart. “It’s an audio amalgam of comms she’s received and sent. There’s nothing original in there at all.”

      Jessica got to her feet, walking around the waveform to stand at Ted’s side. “So it tapped into her comm and composed something from what it found.” She looked up at him. “Is it just me, or is that the opposite of not doing anything?”

      “Well, okay, it’s not nothing,” he allowed. “But it’s not sophisticated, Jess. It’s basically an audio compositor that uses emphasis based on frequency. It’s a parlor trick. It’s the shielding that’s more interesting, and it’s possible even that’s just a variant of the loopback virus we hit a while back.”

      She frowned. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew who was after it. Or how to use it.”

      “I’ve got one more test I want to try,” he told her, “but I’ve been waiting for you, just in case I pass out or something.”

      “You’re going to touch it.”

      “Only way, Jess.”

      “If it goes after you like it did Lanie—”

      “I swapped my comm out right before you got here,” he said. “If it’s doing what I think it’s doing, it’s going to give me nothing but our conversation. And of course some lovely words from you about how wonderful I am.” He grew more serious. “You with me on this?”

      She sighed and dropped her feet off the desk to stand. “I suppose I might as well watch the thing melt your brain.”

      At that, he shot her a grin. “I live to serve.”

      He led her to a small workroom. When he closed them into the space, she raised her eyebrows at him. He shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s a paranoia thing,” he told her. “It commed Lanie when she touched it, but if it’s got an interface that gets activated on contact, I don’t want to give it access to Galileo. This room is comms-locked.”

      She looked around the small space. “What, always?”

      “Sometimes we need a space where things can go wrong without broadcasting to the whole ship.”

      The box containing the artifact was sitting on a table, next to a haphazard stack of spanners. “Is it safe to open?” she asked.

      “The one thing I know,” he told her, “is that if there’s anything radioactive in there, it’s contained by whatever shielding it’s got.” He gave her a look. “You want to wait outside?”

      She shook her head, and he opened the box.

      The artifact was, she thought, about as anticlimactic as it could be. It was a flattened cube with rounded edges and corners, done in a gray polymer. If it had been sitting in a corner of the ship, she wouldn’t even have noticed it. Easy to camouflage, she thought. Easy to make someone pick it up without thinking.

      Ted took a breath, extended a finger, and touched the cube.

      After a moment he lifted his hand and touched it again, then laid his palm on the surface. He took it out of the box and held it with both hands, threaded it between his fingers, tossed it into the air and caught it again. He looked across at Jessica. “Nothing.”

      “What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

      “I mean,” he said patiently, “I’m not getting anything, comms or otherwise, and monitoring is showing no signal.” He placed it back into the box. “If I hadn’t looked at Lanie’s comm myself, I’d have guessed she just hit some kind of random interference.”

      Jessica frowned down at the artifact, suddenly ominous in its nondescriptness. “Is it possible that’s what happened?”

      “Sure. But if it’s not this thing that scrambled her comm, there’s something roaming out in the wild doing it. Besides, she said Jamyung heard it, too, remember?”

      She looked over at him. Something had occurred to her, but she didn’t want to share it yet. “Maybe it’s the comm,” she said. “Something Lanie’s and Jamyung’s had in common.”

      “Maybe it doesn’t like the new ones,” Ted mused. “I could put my old one on and try it again.”

      She shook her head. Regardless of the persistent inertness of the thing, risking Ted felt like an extreme response. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said. “There’s more we can find out without getting reckless. How thick is that inert polymer?”

      “About half a centimeter.” He caught on to her

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