Breach of Containment. Elizabeth Bonesteel

      “I beat you, didn’t I?” He bent down to scratch the head of the sturdy orange tabby cat seated by the door. Mehitabel, Budapest’s standoffish and ubiquitous mascot, twitched her ears irritably and continued washing her face.

      “Only because I stopped.” Elena threw a towel at him.

      “I’ll make sure you catch up with me next time.” He grinned at her, and blushed, and she didn’t quite know what to make of it. She had never seen him flirt with anyone, regardless of sex. Even if she had—she was nearly old enough to be his mother. She knew he was fond of her, but it had never felt like a crush.

      Although … She thought again of Greg. Heaven knows I’ve never been particularly good at picking up on that sort of thing.

      She had not spoken with Greg in nearly a year. She had spent six months on the CCSS Kovalevsky after the Admiralty transferred her off of Galileo, and there they had talked frequently; but when she had decided to resign from the Corps, she had told him nothing in advance. Only Jessica Lockwood—Greg’s second-in-command and Elena’s friend—had known what Elena was going to do, and she had, after some pleading on Elena’s part, kept it to herself.

      “He’s going to hit the ceiling,” Jessica had warned.

      “Then the Admiralty will know he had nothing to do with it.”

      In her most honest moments, Elena wasn’t entirely sure that protectiveness was the only reason she hadn’t wanted to tell Greg ahead of time. She had been increasingly careful in what she shared with him, sticking mostly with conveying any intelligence she had picked up from her crewmates on Kovalevsky. She would ask after Galileo and all of the people she loved. She would ask after him, and his father and his sister back on Earth, and tell him only good things about Kovalevsky and Captain Mirov.

      Telling him the truth—that being in the Corps but not being on Galileo was like flaying her skin open every single day—would have led to a conversation she did not want to have. Returning to Galileo was not an option. In Greg’s early career, he might have had the clout to swing it, but he’d lost any influence he had on the other side of a wormhole.

      Becoming a civilian, she had reasoned, would give her different intelligence channels from the ones Greg and Jessica would find through the Corps. And it would be less of a daily reminder of having left behind everything and everyone, outside of her blood family, that had ever meant anything to her.

      Elena kept her eyes on the cat. Mehitabel was still not reacting to Arin’s ministrations, but Elena was certain she was beginning to hear the quiet rumble of a purr. Mehitabel did not care much for Elena—possibly, Elena had to admit, because most of their interactions involved Elena chasing the cat out of the engine room—but the animal was consistently and quietly affectionate with Arin, and Elena couldn’t fault her for that. “Maybe next time,” Elena remarked, “I won’t let you get ahead in the first place.”

      Arin laughed, and Elena’s comm chimed. She reached behind her ear to acknowledge. “Morning, Yuri,” she said. “What’s up?”

      Yuri was Budapest’s comms officer, second-in-command, and head mechanic. He was also nominally Elena’s superior officer; but Budapest had the reflexive informality of all civilian organizations, and she had learned—most of the time—to roll with it.

      “You’ve got an incoming comm,” Yuri said, and something in his voice made her ears perk up.

      “Someone I know?”

      “Don’t know. A parts trader on Yakutsk, called Jamyung. Bear knows him, a little—we’ve dealt with him before, but not for a couple of years.”

      Elena frowned. She did know Jamyung—she knew most of the traders in the sector, having bought from nearly all of them when she was with the Corps. Like many salvage traders, he had some dubious ethical lines, but her dealings with him had always been straightforward. If he had what she needed, he charged a fair price, and she always got exactly what he’d represented. In return, she’d turned something of a blind eye to the less legal aspects of his business.

      “Why does he want to talk to me?” she asked.

      “He wouldn’t tell me. He sounds a little … agitated.” Yuri paused. “You want me to cut him off?”

      It had been years since she had spoken with Jamyung. She couldn’t imagine why he wanted to talk to her, never mind how he had tracked her down once he realized she wasn’t in the Corps anymore. At least it’s not monotony, she thought. “That’s all right,” she said. “Put him through.”

      She could picture the expression on Yuri’s face, but he completed the connection.

      “Is that you?”

      She recognized Jamyung’s voice: flatly accented Standard, his vowels clipped, his voice full and baritone despite the fact that in person he was slight, like most of the natives on Yakutsk. Yuri was right: he did sound agitated, and out of breath, as if he had been running before he commed her.

      “Who else would it be?” she asked.

      He huffed a breath in her ear. “Fuck me, Shaw, do you know how long it took me to find you? You left the fucking Corps, and nobody at that goddamned Admiralty of yours would tell me where you were. What the fuck?”

      “If I’d known you were looking I’d have sent up a flare.” There would have been no reason for the Admiralty to help him, even if they could have. She used to be certain her former commanders—or at least Shadow Ops, their secret intelligence division—had kept track of her location, even after she resigned. At this point, though, she was inclined to believe she didn’t matter to them anymore. None of which is his fault. “Did you call me to yell, Jamyung?”

      “No. No, no, no.” Another huff. “Not yell. But I need a favor.”

      “Why me?”

      “Because you’re a straight shooter,” he said. “These other Central motherfuckers, you can’t trust them. And the freighter jocks—they haggle over shit like they’re fucking royalty, like I don’t know I’m the only one in six systems with that fucking field regulator they need to keep from blowing themselves to bits. Condescending assholes.”

      She unraveled that. “You’re asking for a favor because you trust me.”

      “Yes. Yes. Because they’ll just tell me I’m fucking nuts, and I need a fucking favor, Shaw.” He was beginning to sound frightened. “You don’t know. Lately, here, it’s been—shit.” Huff. “I am fucked, we are all fucked, and I need a favor, and I have to get rid of this thing.”

      “Calm down.” She glanced at Arin, who had straightened, ignoring the cat, eyes on Elena. She gave him a reassuring smile, then stepped away, rounding the shipping cartons for some privacy. “Why are you fucked? What thing? Start from the beginning.”

      “Okay. Okay. Okay.” Huff. “So you know it’s been fucked here, dome-wise, since the Great Terraformer Experiment went to hell. Fucking politicians killing each other instead of fucking doing something to help people. Same old shit my whole fucking life, because those assholes are fucking bored or something, I don’t know. Never made any fucking sense to me. And yeah, I make money off of it, usually, and why do I care if some lying dumbass governor loses some air?”

      Jamyung was big on storytelling when he was trying to sell something, but he wasn’t sounding like he had parts to move. “So it’s fucked there … and you don’t care?”

      “Yes. No. Because it’s not just the usual bullshit this time. This time people keep talking about nukes. Asking me if I can get them, then getting really fucking you-didn’t-hear-us-ask when I tell them I can’t.”

      Nukes. On a domed colony. Shit. “Is this a reliable rumor, or just the usual mine-is-bigger crap?”

      “Reliable. Solid. They keep