Spindrift Read Free

Collins are still ESA officers.” Once again, he locked eyes with her. “Don’t fight me on this one, Ana. I guarantee that you’ll lose.”
    Tereshkova remained silent for a moment, as if weighing her options. Shillinglaw heard boots scuffle on the deck past the half-open hatch behind her; he didn’t need to look that way to know that there were probably Federation Militia soldiers standing less than eight feet away, carbines in hand. The Coyote Federation might have signed UN-sanctioned treaties, but it would be a long time before the governments of Earth would be trusted again.
    â€œAll right,” she said, letting out her breath as if in resignation. “You get ten minutes…but only ten. Then I’m personally escorting them to quarantine, and after that you wait your turn along with everyone else.”
    Meaning representatives from the Western Hemisphere Union, the Pacific Coalition, the unaligned nonspacefaring nations, the press corps, and anyone else who had an interest in speaking with the survivors of the Galileo expedition. Which was exactly why Shillinglaw had jumped a shuttle to Highgate as soon as he learned that the Lee was bringing them back to Earth; he had to get their story before anyone else did.
    â€œI’d rather have fifteen, but”—he gestured toward the hatch—“your call. Lead the way.”
    Without another word, Tereshkova turned away. As he followed her from the airlock, Shillinglaw did his best to ignore the soldiers standing just outside the hatch. One remained in position while the other fell in behind them. The captain was taking no chances.
    They moved aft through the ship, making their way down narrow corridors just wide enough for two crewmen to squeeze past one another. They passed crew compartments, fire equipment lockers, and ladders leading to upper decks until they reached another airlock. The lamp above it was green; Tereshkova turned its lockwheel and pushed open the candy-striped hatch. Shillinglaw followed her inside and waited until she shoved the second hatch open. She stepped aside and motioned for him to go through.
    The shuttle bay was as cavernous as the rest of the ship was cramped, its ceiling nearly sixty feet above their heads, the deck long enough to serve as a basketball court. Two skiffs were parked wing to wing on the other side of the bay, their tricycle landing gear chocked and tied down, and a repair pod rested within its cradle nearby. Yet it was the spacecraft in the center of the bay that caught Shillinglaw’s attention.
    The EAS Maria Celeste was an older shuttle, a model retired from active service nearly a generation ago. Downswept wings on either side of a broad aft section connected to a sleek forward crew module that vaguely resembled a cobra head; an access ramp had been lowered from beneath the hull. There was one much like it on display at the ESA museum at Elysium Centre, complete with stairs leading to the cockpit so that kids could climb inside and play with the controls of the craft that had once been the workhorse of the Mars colonies. Very sturdy, very reliable, and very obsolete.
    This one might have just rolled off the assembly line, though, were it not for blackened carbon scores along the underside of its hull and the leading edge of its wings. Yet the wear and tear of atmospheric entry wasn’t what made it unusual. In the stern section, where there had once been the twin bulges of its gas-core nuclear engines, were now a pair of oblong pods, fat and seamless, with no discernible features save for darkened plates along their sides. The old engines were missing; these contraptions were now in their place.
    Shillinglaw stared at the shuttle with disbelief. The Maria Celeste had returned, all right…yet it wasn’t the craft that had been mated with the Galileo when it left Earth nearly sixty years ago. Something had gotten to it, changed it…
    â€œLike my ship?” A