As best he could judge, Jumoke didn’t know that, either.
“Then why the government seizure of our ship?” Blake countered.
Jumoke shook her head.
Rounding a corner they came to a door marked Private. Petty knocked.
The man who opened the door was all but bald, with vulpine features, ice-blue eyes, and a trim salt-and-pepper goatee. It was a face you wouldn’t forget even if its owner weren’t so often in the news: one of the planetary governor’s most senior advisers, and her liaison to the Civil Defense Authority.
Blake did his best to ignore politics and doubly so politicians, but having grown up in Massachusetts, Hawthorne wasn’t a name Blake could forget. This was Neil Hawthorne, not Nathaniel, but that was close enough.
“Dr. Boro, the governor is eager to speak with you,” Hawthorne said. “Please come in.”
Huh? “Aren’t we all wanted?” Blake asked.
“Officer?” Hawthorne said.
Petty motioned toward a sofa along the corridor wall. “Why don’t you two wait here?”
Once again, her words did not strike Blake as a request.
3
Dana McElwain sat tall at her end of the sofa, tuning out Blake’s fidgeting, weighing the possibilities. She didn’t like mysteries, and she really disliked deceit, but an important part of leadership was thinking before speaking.
Across the hallway, long, slow combers rolled up a digital beach and ran out again. Scraps of seaweed swirled in tidal pools. A crab scuttled across the wet sand. Seagulls soared in the virtual sky. The susurrus of the waves and the faint cries of the birds masked whatever Jumoke and the others discussed in the private office.
“Jumoke is involved,” Dana finally admitted, “at least in what she chose not to tell us.”
“Then this is about the DED.”
“It’s hard to see things any other way,” Dana said, “but there must be more to it. If our recall were only about Jumoke or the DED, why bring in the two of us? We fly the ship, we don’t own it.”
Blake had no answer for that.
He had a square face, all planes and angles, more wholesome than handsome. His sandy hair stood up in fashionable spikes; his eyes, blue and deep-set, sat beneath wispy blond eyebrows. He went in and out of wearing a pencil-thin mustache, just as wispy. This month the fuzz was out.
Blake could be charming, and with Dana he usually was. He could also have a temper. Just then he looked ready to deck someone.
“Whatever the reason for our summons,” Dana cautioned him, “hear them out.”
At last, the anonymous door opened. “Captain McElwain,” Hawthorne said. “If you would please join us.”
Blake had the good sense to keep quiet.
“And Mr. Westford…?” Dana hinted.
“Will wait here,” Hawthorne completed.
She brushed past Hawthorne, prepared to demand answers and, perhaps, an apology.
Until Jumoke’s deer-in-the-headlights expression stopped Dana cold.
*
Dana paused in the doorway, taking in the scene.
The utilitarian office held a massive oaken desk faced by a shallow arc of padded armchairs. Behind the desk, a floor-to-ceiling clear wall overlooked the city. Sheer white curtains softened the view. Three sides of the room were data walls, all dark.
A silver-haired woman, native-Martian lanky, dressed in a tailored black suit, sat at the desk: Governor Luella Dennison. The governor came across as flinty in person as on the net, but something unexpected peeked out from behind her eyes. Grim determination.
To do what? Dana wondered.
Jumoke, in the leftmost chair of the arc, had turned toward the door. She managed a nod of greeting.
A man sat beside Jumoke, studying the floor, and Dana recognized him, too. He was short, even by her Earth standards, and stocky, with dark, curly hair, a strong jaw, apple cheeks, and a jagged scar across his chin. Apart from his Mediterranean complexion, he could have passed for a leprechaun.
Dr. Antonio Valenti had flown on Clermont, maybe four outings earlier, deploying probes for some kind of distributed, deep-space observatory. Dana had learned in one try never to call him Tony. It had been a long flight, in more ways than one. On topics other than gravitational waves, condiments, extinction patterns of marine invertebrates, Paris subway schedules (why Paris, she had no idea), and nineteenth-century Pacific island commemorative stamps, Antonio was a clam.
It had been a two-for-the-price-of-one excursion, combining deployment of the Einstein Gravitational Wave Observatory for Antonio with another long-range test flight of the DED. So: Jumoke had been aboard, too. Not a coincidence, Dana guessed.
“If you’ll take a seat, Captain McElwain,” the governor said.
Dana sat next to Antonio. She tried to catch his eye, hoping for some hint there about the purpose of this gathering, but his gaze kept sliding away from her.
Hawthorne closed the door before settling into the chair at the opposite end of the arc. He retrieved a folded datasheet from a corner of the governor’s desk.
“Captain, thank you for coming.”
“Yes, Governor.” The words had almost come out Yes, sir: old habits coming to the fore.
Dennison glanced down at her desktop. “Please confirm that I have this right. Born into a military family, 2093, in London. Twenty-five years in the UW military as a pilot, mustered out with the rank of commander. Several commendations for meritorious service and bravery.”
“Space Guard,” Dana clarified. Dad had raised her on heroic tales of the evac after the Tycho City dome collapse. Absent an interplanetary conflict, the Space Guard operated apart from the United Worlds armed forces. “Customs enforcement. Asteroid tagging and deflection. Mainly I flew search and rescue.”
“Most notably, rescuing fifteen survivors from the cruise ship Logan.”
From what had remained of the Logan. Dana still sometimes bolted awake in a cold sweat, trembling with the memories of threading a path through the debris field, of the flotsam—and vacuum-bloated corpses—caroming off her hull, of matching course with the tumbling, wobbling stub of a ship left after the drive explosion.
She had worse nightmares of the derelicts she hadn’t gotten to in time.
“Yes, Governor,”
