Elizabeth Bonesteel - Remnants of Trust

Harper Voyager an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 2016

Copyright © Elizabeth Bonesteel 2016

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2016

Author photo © Virginia Bonesteel

Elizabeth Bonesteel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008137830

Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008137847

Version: 2016-10-21

For Alex

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part II

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part III

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Bonesteel

About the Publisher

At least, thought Elena, I’ll die in a Corps uniform.

She faced down the gun, looking not into the barrel but into the eyes of the man holding it. Keita had brown eyes, but in the frigid, rainy afternoon of this dying planet they looked jet-black and devoid of light. He had always—for as long as she had known him—looked angry, but she thought she saw something else as he stared at her through the gun’s sight. Not fear, not that. Keita had never been afraid.

He looked lost .

The others were clustered behind him in the meager shelter of a crumbled cement wall. Savin was stoic as always, weight on one foot, but she saw his left hand resting on the grip of his pulse rifle. Jimmy had placed himself between Keita and Niree’s prone figure, the medic shielding his patient. Elena knew his expression without looking. The loud argument, in a shattered alley next to a public square, was risking their exposure. Jimmy would be annoyed with her.

“Get the fuck out of the way, Shaw!” Keita yelled.

She did not move. “Stand down, Ensign,” she said evenly.

“She killed the lieutenant! She set him up! You were there! You saw just like I did!”

Behind her, the girl she was protecting made a small sound, and Elena wanted to tell her to shut up. “She was a prisoner, Keita,” she said. The child had been in chains, used as bait. Keita had seen it, even if they had been too late to keep the lieutenant from being gunned down. “Lieutenant Treharne was trying to save her, and now you want to kill her?”

The gun’s barrel never wavered. “I will blow a hole through you, too, Shaw.”

At that, Jimmy couldn’t keep silent. “Keita—”

“Shut up, Jimmy.”

She and Keita said it in unison, and she almost laughed. But it was time to bring the confrontation to an end. “You’ll have to blow a hole through me, then, because I’m not fucking moving, ” she said. “Make up your goddamned mind. We don’t have time for this shit.”

Seconds passed. Elena could hear the girl whimpering behind her, and fought off irritation. What good were tears? Tears wouldn’t make him put the gun down. Elena needed him to stop reacting and start thinking. She knew he could do it. She had seen him do it. She had served with him for six months aboard the CCSS Exeter, and despite his pretension of brainless thuggery, he was far more thoughtful than his usual manner betrayed.

“What about you, Savin?” Keita addressed the other infantry officer. “You with me, or are you going to listen to some fucking songbird ?”

The nickname sounded ridiculous in context. But Savin, in his typically taciturn fashion, responded immediately:

“Songbird.”

Keita’s gaze faltered, and for a moment she caught a glimpse of pain in his eyes. Then he lowered his rifle, swore loudly, and stalked off.

The girl behind Elena began to sob openly. Elena ignored her, catching Savin’s eye. “Give him thirty seconds,” she instructed, “then get him back here.” Savin nodded and trotted after his friend. She turned to Jimmy, who had witnessed the entire exchange with growing incredulity. “Can you move her?” she asked.

Jimmy looked down at the fifth surviving member of their landing party. Lieutenant Niree Osai, ranking officer since Treharne’s death, was not unconscious, but she was in shock, blinking absently into the rain, her breathing shallow. Jimmy had used his jacket to wrap the remains of her arm, protecting the torn and ruined flesh from the acidic rainfall, but her color was awful, and she seemed to have no sense of where she was. Part of Elena envied her.

“She’s not stable,” he said. “She’s in shock, her pressure’s in the toilet, and she’s not nearly unconscious enough.”

“You misunderstand me.” She locked eyes with him. “I didn’t say should you move her, I said can you. Do you need help carrying her?”

“Lanie, she’s had her arm torn off. Moving her like this could kill her.”

She did not outrank him. She did not outrank any of them. She had no leg to stand on if she tried to give him an order. She wondered if Keita’s tactic with the rifle would work better for her. “Jimmy, if we’re not off this rock in seventeen and a half minutes, we lose our weather window, and we’re stuck here for thirty-seven hours. You fancy our chances for another thirty-seven hours?”

He knew as well as she did that they couldn’t survive it. Trained infantry or not, they were foreigners on this colony, and the natives who were hunting them knew every side street and abandoned building in the city. Starvation may have driven Canberra’s settlers mad, but it had not rendered them stupid. Keita and Savin had been able to retrieve Niree from them, but over two nights and a day, none of Elena’s team stood a chance.

Jimmy gave her a pleading look, but she did not shift. At last he sighed. “Yeah,” he told her, resigned. “I can carry her.”