LITMIR.BIZ

       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. Clearly something in how he had presented himself had put her off.

      He 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

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