LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Foster had accepted without qualification. They were headed toward the bow of the ship to deliver Aida to the comms center, dependent on the schematic Captain Foster had sent over, which he had told her would likely be out of date. That should not have surprised her—Orunmila was being constantly reconfigured; no map but their own dynamically generated schematic would be accurate more than a few weeks—but she had not, she realized, thought of Corps ships as similarly living, changing habitats.

      They came around a corner, and Guanyin caught the sound of distant voices. Instantly she halted the group, and snuffed out the lights; for a moment the absolute darkness blinded her, and then she caught a weak glimmer of light far ahead. She turned her own light on, very low, and began creeping forward again; Cali, cured of her snit in the face of her duty, moved in front of her, hugging the wall as she crept forward on quiet feet. Guanyin gripped her handgun—a lethal but short-range model her arms officer had suggested as useful for avoiding unintended hull breaches—and strained to make out words.

      She recognized first that they were speaking Standard. Not entirely a guarantee of safety, but most of the raiders she had run across spoke their own dialects, cobbled together from a half-dozen local languages or more, and communicated in Standard or PSI dialects roughly and with thick accents. On impulse, she commed Captain Foster. “Captain, do you have anyone aft of Control?”

      “Not yet, Captain. We’ve got vacuum between here and there. What have you got?”

      She was quiet again, listening. “Possible survivors, I believe. I will let you know.” She cut the comm, and nodded to Cali.

      They all stopped, and Cali shouted, “Drop your weapons and stand down!”

      A flurry of footsteps, the sound of weapons powering up, a series of shouts and murmurs. And then one voice, over the rest: “That’s a PSI dialect, you shitheads. Stand the fuck down.”

      Guanyin placed the voice almost immediately. “It’s all right,” she told Cali and Aida. “They’re Exeter.” And striding in front of her friend, she rounded the corner.

      There were eight of them, all standing on their own two feet, she noted with relief. Despite the stand-down order every one of them still had their hands on the bodies of long pulse rifles—no concerns about hull breaches here. As an afterthought she holstered her own weapon. None of them were in environmental suits, and instinctively she reached up and tugged her hood off. Instantly she was hit with the odor of burning electricals and ozone, combined with the pungent odor of human sweat. Just like home, she thought, and approached the tall man at the head of the group.

      “Commander Keita, I believe,” she said, and held out her hand. “I am Captain Shiang Guanyin, of Orunmila.”

      She did not think he would remember her. She had met him briefly, two years ago, shortly after he had been promoted, during one of the supply missions they had performed with Exeter. He looked older than she remembered, but otherwise she was struck by the same things: his wide, thick-necked build that made him seem even taller than he was, the chiseled, almost cruel handsomeness of his square, dark-skinned face, the strange softness of his brown eyes that made her think of an artist more than a soldier. She recalled his smile, which had moderated his features considerably; he had been quick-witted, she remembered, friendly and professional in a way that had put even Chanyu at ease. She had liked him immediately, and she felt an unexpected wave of relief at seeing his face.

      He took her hand, and a shadowy version of that smile passed over his lips. “Good to see you, Captain. And thank you for stepping into the battle when you did. Without you, we’d have been dust before Galileo arrived.”

      “I am grateful we were close,” she said sincerely. Beside her, Cali was radiating disapproval. “This is Lieutenant Annenkov, in charge of my security, and Mr. Aida, my comms officer. We are trying to rendezvous with Captain Foster in the bow of the ship.” She cast her eye over the rubble beyond his people. “It might be faster for us to go back to the shuttle and fly to the other side.”

      Keita’s lips tightened, making him look grim again. “Captain Çelik is on the other side of that,” he explained. “He was heading from Control down to engineering—or what’s left of it—to find out what the fuck was going on with our guns, and we took a hit.”

      All of her relief vanished. “What do you need?”

      “Beyond shifting all this debris? Structural support, I think,” he said. “There’s no vacuum on the other side, but this whole section got hit hard. We can’t be sure we won’t be pulling the whole ceiling down by digging out.”

      She could send back for some of her structural engineers, but the thought of the time it would take for them to fly over twisted the knot in her stomach. She commed Captain Foster again. “We have survivors,” she told him.

      She heard him exhale sharply. “How many?”

      “Eight. Commander Keita is here. And … they tell me they believe Captain Çelik is behind this debris. Do you have any structural people with you? I suspect there is some urgency here.”

      “I’m going to connect my engineer,” he told her; and then a moment later: “Chief? Where are you?”

      A woman’s voice, as calm and self-assured as his, responded. “We’re about a hundred meters from Control. We haven’t found anyone so far.”

      “Captain Shiang is down there, with some of Exeter’s people. They’re trying to dig Captain Çelik out of some wreckage. Can you evaluate the structural situation?”

      But the woman didn’t answer his question. “Who’s down there?” she asked, considerably less calm.

      Guanyin opened her mouth to answer, but Commander Keita spoke first. “Songbird? Is that you?”

      “Dee?” The woman sounded relieved. “My God, Dee. Are you all right?”

      “I’ve got a fucking pulse, at least. Get your ass down here and help us dig the captain out.”

      “Right.” The businesslike tone was back. “Thirty seconds.”

      “Captain,” Guanyin put in, “I suspect there will be more need for structural evaluations. Exeter took a great many hits.”

      “Agreed.” There was a hint of weariness in his voice now, as if his chief’s urgency had drained him somehow. “Can we pick up the pace on the security sweep?”

      “I have another hundred people I can bring over,” she told him. “We should be able to clear the ship in thirty minutes.” Faster if you’d let him show me all those years ago, Guanyin thought bitterly at Chanyu. She could have cleared Orunmila in ten minutes, she knew the corridors so well.

      “I can send a medic your way as well,” Foster offered.

      It was on the tip of her tongue to refuse him. “I think that would be wise,” she agreed. “I will also bring in a team from Orunmila. Captain Çelik will not, I think, be the last casualty we find.”

      As Cali commed back to Orunmila, relaying her instructions, Galileo’s people rounded the corner.

      There were seven of them, all armed and armored, led by a striking woman with dark hair, as tall as Guanyin was herself. In an instant of incongruous shock, Guanyin recognized her, and she realized she should have guessed the moment Captain Foster said Chief.

      When she had finally thought to search the mainstream news outlets for information on Greg Foster, she had been surprised to find he had been part of what had happened in the Fifth Sector last year. The face of Central’s involvement had been this woman’s: Commander Elena Shaw, a mechanic who had laid her life on the line for love of a retired PSI captain. Which was the popular myth, of course; Guanyin, who had little sentiment around love, suspected the reality of it was both more mundane and more complex. She had seen a brief, much-reproduced vid of Commander Shaw shouting at some police officers, and while the woman had seemed passionate in her pursuit of justice, she had

Скачать книгу