Elizabeth Bonesteel - Remnants of Trust

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 rang the door chime when she arrived. This was a regression—for years she had walked into his office unannounced, confident of her welcome. But showing up at all … that was progress. Glacial and frustrating, but progress.

He had Galileo open the door, and his chief of engineering walked in. Elena Shaw, his closest friend before he had blown it all up, still the person he trusted above anyone else. He had thought, for years, that what he felt for her was complicated, designed to trip him up when he least expected it. For a time, he had thought her presence was a curse. It was only recently, when faced with losing her, that he had recognized what he felt for her was simple. What was complicated was coping with it.

Oblivious to his ruminating, she dropped into the chair across from him and wrapped her fingers around the mug of hot tea. “So how far did you get?” she asked.

She was watching him with those eyes of hers, sharp and perceptive and bright with intelligence. Also dark and beautiful and so easy to get lost in. She was not pretty the way many of the women on his ship were pretty: her features were too uneven, the balance thrown off by her huge eyes and substantial nose. But there was an elegance about her, the way she moved, the way she spoke, as if she were some creature of earth and fire, liquid and molten. He often thought he could spend the rest of his days quite happily doing nothing but watching her.

In fact, he had said this to his father when he had visited last month. The older man had shaken his head, and said it was a damn good thing Greg had gotten divorced.

More proof he knows me better than I thought he did.

“Through last week,” he replied to Elena’s question.

She rolled her eyes, leaning back and lifting the mug close to her face. “I’m three weeks behind,” she confessed. “I have too much work to do for this shit.”

“It’s not about the report. It’s about reminding us who’s the boss.”

She knew that, of course. They had discussed the outcome at the time, and both understood the court-martial could have ended quite differently. The Admiralty would have been well within its rights to throw them out of the service entirely—saving the sector be damned. They hadn’t, and the one conclusion he and Elena had come up with was that the Admiralty simply couldn’t agree on what to do with them. “Some of them wanted to give you a medal,” Admiral Herrod had told Greg shortly after the trial’s conclusion. “Some of them wanted to separate the two of you.” At that the old man had frowned, and for a moment Greg had the impression that the typically circumspect admiral was speaking entirely off the record. “Whatever else you do, Foster—don’t let them separate you. And watch your back.”

It was a precaution Greg had already thought about, but hearing Herrod suggest it, when he couldn’t be sure where the man’s loyalties lay, left Greg feeling even more uncertain and unsafe.

When he had repeated Herrod’s 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.