Читать книгу Remnants of Trust - Elizabeth Bonesteel - Страница 8

Guanyin was always amazed by how well puppies could sleep.

Samedi had slid into the narrow space between her pregnant belly and the wall, his body twisted like soft pastry, and was snoring blissfully into her ear as she stared at the ceiling. When he had first dozed off she had tried blowing on his nose. The first two times he had twitched, but the third time he was oblivious. She could almost certainly get out of bed without disturbing him, but she needed him as an excuse. If she sat up she would feel obligated to stand, and if she stood, she would feel obligated to talk to Cali about the warship Central Corps had just dropped in their backyard.

Cali would expect her to have worked it out, to have a plan of action. She had always looked to Guanyin for direction, even when they were children. Cali was three years older, but she had always been more comfortable as Guanyin’s foot soldier than as her mentor. Guanyin knew many in her crew expected her to choose Cali as her second-in-command, and certainly she could trust Cali with her life. But for a first officer, Guanyin needed an adviser, someone who could help challenge her thinking. That was not Cali.

That was Chanyu, the ship’s former captain, but he had retired. They had left him on Prokofiev’s third moon, waiting for a shuttle to the Fifth Sector. She could probably find him if she needed to, but she knew what he would say. “You must find your own way, Guanyin. Orunmila is yours now. She lives or dies under your command. And remember, dear girl, she wouldn’t be yours if they didn’t believe in you. All you need to do is be worthy of them.” Chanyu had raised her, and she loved him like a father, but she never could stand it when he spouted that sort of useless rubbish.

Guanyin was twenty-nine years old, pregnant with her sixth child, and captain of a starship that was home to 812 people. She had no second-in-command and no advisers, and it was down to her to figure out how to respond to a deployment buildup from the largest, best-armed government in the galaxy.

“It’s only one ship,” Yunru had remarked over dinner with their children. “It may not mean what you think it means.” Which had occurred to her, of course. The CCSS Galileo was small for a Central starship, half the size of Exeter, the ship Orunmila most often dealt with. But unlike the equally small science ship CCSS Cassia, Galileo was unambiguously a warship. Central was not entirely inept at diplomacy, but they always felt the need to back it up with weapons. Galileo was spectacularly well equipped to do just that.

Not that she couldn’t understand why Central would feel the need to build up their weaponry in the Third Sector. Numerous multiyear crop failures had led to an increase in intersystem squabbles and civil wars, and the Syndicate tribes, finding larger markets for contraband, were becoming bolder and more aggressive. But when Galileo had appeared a few weeks ago, contacting supply chains and shipping companies as if she had been in the Third Sector for years, Guanyin had found their polite diplomatic greeting entirely inadequate.

It had taken Guanyin very little research to remind herself where she had heard the ship’s name before. Galileo had been credited last year with preventing an all-out war in the Fifth Sector. No less than Valeria Solomonoff herself, the Fifth Sector’s most venerable PSI captain, had signed a treaty with Central through Galileo. Galileo’s captain, a man called Greg Foster, was widely considered to be an accomplished diplomat.

Guanyin disliked diplomats. She always found they were too good at lying for her taste. So when Greg Foster had contacted her, ostensibly to introduce his ship, she had been cold, unfriendly, and more than a little blunt.

“You waste your time with me, Captain Foster,” she had told him. “It is the Syndicates attacking your ships, not us.”

The last six months had seen a marked increase in Syndicate raider activity, and for the first time in decades they had included Central Corps starships in their targets. PSI, who had dealt with raiders for centuries, was the obvious place for Central to turn when formulating their own strategies for dealing with guerrilla attacks. A request for help Guanyin might have understood, the sort of short-term alliance PSI and the Corps had formed repeatedly over the centuries. She did not understand this amorphous buildup of Central’s power, and it bothered her.

What is Central planning?

The baby rolled and kicked, and Samedi woke up, his wolfish face next to hers. She reached up a hand and rubbed him reassuringly between the ears. “Do you suppose they are trying to trick us, little one?” she asked. “Or do they fear something specific, and don’t want to tell us what it is?”

Samedi gazed at her with his contented, worshipful eyes, and sneezed in her face.

Cali heard her roll out of bed, and came in from the sitting room to lean against the bathroom doorframe as Guanyin washed her face. “He’s too young to be in bed with you,” Cali said.

“When he’s old enough he’ll be too big.”

“You slept with Shuja when he weighed more than you did.”

“Shuja never weighed that much.” Actually, Cali was right: Shuja had topped out at sixty kilos before he had started dropping weight due to illness and old age. Guanyin only broke fifty-five when she was pregnant. But she had been pregnant for half of Shuja’s adult life, and she had grown used to having a dog curled up next to her expanding stomach. “Samedi will learn.”

Cali crossed her arms and glowered.

“Your face will freeze that way, you know.”

Not that it would matter if it did, of course. Cali was beautiful, and she knew it, breaking hearts without thinking much about it. Guanyin, who never doubted her own place in Cali’s heart, yelled at her sometimes, but it made no difference, and she supposed Cali would have to grow out of it on her own. But Guanyin knew one of the reasons she had reacted to Captain Foster the way she had was because he reminded her of Cali, right down to the polite condescension.

Guanyin turned away from the sink. “Can I ask you something?”

Cali pushed herself off the doorframe as Guanyin walked past and asked Orunmila for some music. Guanyin settled back onto the bed next to the patient puppy, wide-awake now and wagging his entire body, trying and failing to resist licking her face. “No, love,” she said sternly, and he backed off onto his haunches, waiting for her to change her mind.

Cali pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. “Is this about the Corps captain?”

“He talked to me like you do, sometimes. Like I’m helpless, or too young to understand. He seemed to think I would find him persuasive and comforting, just because he has a nice smile, never mind the volume of weapons his ship is carrying into our territory.”

At that, Cali grinned. “Did you swear at him?”

It was Guanyin’s turn to glower. “Why do you do it? When you know I understand all this better than you do. Why do you treat me like a child?”

Cali shrugged and looked away. “Because I love you, I suppose, and I don’t like that things are hard for you. I want to do it for you, even when I can’t.”

That was a surprisingly introspective observation for Cali. “Captain Foster doesn’t love me.”

“Maybe you remind him of someone else.”

“Maybe he thinks, because I’m new, I’m a fool.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. He dealt with Valeria Solomonoff in the Fifth Sector. You really think she let him get away with shit like this?”

“Maybe she doesn’t like him, either.”

“I spoke to her. She trusts him. She said, and I quote, ‘He is fighting what we are fighting.’ You know what she didn’t say?”

“I wasn’t there, Guanyin.”

“She didn’t say ‘He is a good soldier.’ So why is he talking to me as if there is nothing going on?”

Cali leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “You know, Guanyin, you could ask him. I mean, instead of trying to analyze what Solomonoff really meant, or poking at my character flaws.”

She sighed, gently tugging Samedi’s soft ears. “I was rude to him.”

“They’re rude to us all the time, and they’ve still told one of their captains to kiss your ass.” Cali shrugged. “They want something. Find out what it is. Maybe we can get something in return.”

Admittedly, that was not terrible advice. “What could they possibly want from us?”

At her words, Samedi launched himself at her again, and she had to close her eyes against his silky-soft tongue. “Hopefully puppies,” Cali said dryly, and Guanyin laughed.

The comm on her wall chimed, and Aida spoke without waiting for acknowledgment. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Captain Shiang,” he said, “but we’re receiving a distress call.”

She could hear it in his voice: tension and fear. She sat up, her hand resting on Samedi’s head. “Acknowledge and reroute,” she told him, knowing he would have started the process already. “Who is it?”

“It’s a Central starship, ma’am,” he said. “Captain—it’s Exeter.”

She met Cali’s eyes. They had not seen Exeter in more than six months—since before Chanyu’s retirement—but they had run countless missions with her for a decade. She had thought to wonder, just that morning, why Central had not had Exeter arrange for her to meet Galileo’s captain, instead of expecting her to accept the goodwill of a stranger. She wondered if Captain Çelik was still at Exeter’s helm.

She wondered if he was all right.

“What are they up against?” She swung her feet to the floor and stood, all her fatigue washed away by adrenaline.

“Syndicate ships, Captain. They’re reporting twenty-seven.”

Twenty-seven raiders. Against a Central starship. “How close are we?”

“Two minutes, eight seconds, ma’am.”

“Get all weapons online,” she told him. “Orunmila, call battle stations ship-wide.”

The lights shifted to blue, and the quiet, repeating alarm came over the ship’s public comm system. Cali fell into step behind her as she rushed out of her quarters into the hallway.

Raiders were often reckless—and occasionally suicidal—but attacking Central was a recent tactic. There had been three attacks over the last six months, always the usual smash-and-grab, and only one had been at all successful. So many raiders against a single starship … the Syndicates were never so bold. An attack so aggressive was insanity. Even if they scored against Exeter, who was well armed in her own right, Central could not let the attack stand. This battle, whatever the cause, was only the start, and the Syndicates had to know that.

She thought again of Galileo’s abrupt appearance, and wondered how much Central had known in advance.