The Cold Between (13 page)

“And how will it do that?”

Limonov glanced briefly at Ted, then back at her. Slowly he leaned down until his face was close to hers, until he could speak to her without Ted overhearing. His huge, deep-set eyes were intense, beseeching—what he was about to tell her was important.

“
It sings,
” he said.

Ted cleared his throat and put a hand on Jessica's arm. “Thank you, Commander. I'm sure you're busy. We're sorry we bothered you.” He pulled on her, and she took a step back.

Limonov straightened, his face returning to its sad mask, and turned back to his work. Jessica pulled her arm free, trying to think of something to say. She thought at any moment she would start shivering. “Thank you, Commander Limonov,” she said. “I appreciate your candor.” But he did not turn around, and after a moment she turned and followed Ted out of engineering.

“I told you,” Ted said, as the door closed behind them. “He's nuts. Not useful. Who are we talking to next?”

Jessica's mind was reeling. None of it made sense, and yet somehow it did. Danny had seen something in the man's ravings. Certainly not a warning, but something he had taken for information.
It will take all of us.
How was that possible, when nobody could get close to it? But it all tied together, she realized. Solomonoff's PSI ship.
Demeter.
The
Phoenix.
Whether or not the wormhole was cursed, an awful lot of dramatic events seemed to happen in its vicinity.

Damn, she was beginning to think like a crazy conspiracy theorist.

“Anybody you can get,” she told Ted. “Anybody who will talk to you. See if you can find out if they overheard anything between Limonov and Danny, maybe something more coherent than what he just said.”

“You really think there's something there?”

“I don't know. Probably not.” Her heart was racing, and the
tingle down her spine had not quit. “But Danny sure as hell did, and I'm betting whatever it was has something to do with what really happened to him. Find out, Ted.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to report to the captain,” she told him.
And maybe,
she thought,
get some useful information from him for once.

Volhynia

H
e came in a little before ten,” the young woman said, her fingers wrapped around a mug of hot coffee. Despite the steam rising from the liquid, her fingernails were white, and Elena could see her hands trembling. The bartender had tipped some dark liquid into the cup along with the coffee. Elena hoped it was something potent.

Elena had let Trey deal with her. He had become instantly solicitous: helping her into a chair, calling to the bartender for assistance, intently focused on her well-being. A detached part of Elena found this impressive, because within seconds the young woman was clutching at his arm, leaning on him, hanging on as if he were the only solid thing left in her universe.

They would not need to worry about anyone here mistrusting PSI.

Trey had extracted her name—Ynes Bardzecki—and accepted her offer of coffee for them both before asking her his first gentle question. Elena sat back and let him lead. It was strange, hearing this tiny young woman talk about Danny as if she had known him. If Elena had come in with Danny, Ynes would never even have learned his name.

“He asked for a table by the window, but he didn't stay there,” Ynes recalled. “He ordered one beer, and drank about half before he got up and started going from table to table, talking to people.”

“That seems odd,” Trey said.

Ynes nodded. “We're a social enough place, but it's almost always the research teams from the observatory, and they tend to stick to their own. I kept an eye on him in case he started bothering people, but everybody seemed pleased to talk to him. Everybody. It was weird; he'd introduce himself and sit down, and within about three minutes whoever he was sitting with was smiling and chatting as if they'd known him for years.”

That sounded like the Danny Elena knew: the collector of stories. He had collected her stories, too. It had been lovely, at first, to have someone so interested. Only after Jake's death had she come to realize he did not always understand what the stories meant. “Do you know what sorts of things they talked about?” she asked.

“Mostly he was asking them about their research,” she said. “I didn't understand a lot of it, but it was the same sort of thing they always talked about.”

They must have been fascinating for some other reason, Elena thought. Danny had been able to muster an interest in most topics, but anything even remotely mathematical made his mind skitter off onto something else. “My dad was an accountant,” he had told her, “so of course I have as little to do with numbers as I can.” She felt briefly grateful that Danny's parents had not lived to see their oldest child lost.

“When did you begin speaking to him?” Trey asked.

“Just after the lights went out,” she replied. “I watch people
when the Dead Hour starts; it says a lot about them, how they react. He didn't even blink. Mostly he seemed surprised that everybody else went quiet.”

“What did the two of you talk about?” Trey asked.

“We didn't talk about anything serious, not really. He asked me about my job, and what I liked about it. I asked about his, and he said he thought he was better at it in his head than in the real world. I liked that,” she said quietly. “Who hasn't thought that about their job?”

Elena's heart twisted. Danny, the perpetual underachiever. It seemed that he had known it.

“He talked about this woman, too,” Ynes added. “He said he'd asked her before to meet him here, but he was glad she turned him down this time.”

Elena did not dare look at Trey.

“That must have been unwelcome,” he said. “To have him bring up another woman.” He shifted his hand on the table, just a little, and his fingers brushed Elena's wrist.

“It was me who brought it up,” the hostess admitted. “There's a look they get, when they're not really free. Only he said he'd screwed it up. I thought that was nice, too, that he said that. Most guys? They want to complain about the ex, talk about how awful she was, all the ways I'm not like her. You know? But he said it was his own fault, and then he went back to asking about me.”

He had liked this woman, Elena realized. She remembered how he could be, when he was trying; he had been the same with her, early on, when she was deciding whether to risk dating someone on board. He had asked her about herself, and he had listened. More than that, he had
remembered.
She looked at
Ynes, young and uncomplicated, and thought how much better suited she would have been to Danny.

“He even asked me about that ship from before,” she said.

Coincidence again. Elena shook off self-pity. “You mean
Demeter.
” When the woman nodded, she asked, “Did he ask anything specific?”

“It's funny,” Ynes said, “because it's sort of what you're asking about him. He wondered why they had been here, in this bar, instead of the usual tourist haunts by the spaceport.”

“Did you know? With them all being so drunk?”

The woman looked embarrassed; she seemed unused to criticizing her customers. “It wasn't all of them, not really,” she said. “Just most of them, and that was the problem. By the time the police got here, Stanis wanted them all out. But there were two I can remember. One of them was . . . strange-looking. Like his face was falling in on itself.”

Elena wondered if
Demeter
had anyone else who fit that description as well as Limonov.

“He spent most of his time in a corner, talking to one of the researchers. That old fellow.” She looked at Trey. “The one you've come in with a couple of times. Ilya.”

Elena knew Trey well enough to recognize surprise in his eyes, but all he did was smile at the hostess. “You have an excellent memory,” he remarked, and Ynes blushed again.

“You're easy to remember,” she told him. “And your friend—he doesn't come in often, but he's always nice. They aren't all, you know. The researchers. Some of them think I'm a dim-witted city girl, but he never talks down to me.”

“Do you know what they discussed?” Elena asked, refocusing her.

Ynes shook her head. “I didn't listen in. I kept an eye on them, just in case, but they were fine. They'd left before the police showed up.”

Elena filed that away to ask Trey about later. “Who else stayed sober?”

“One grim-looking older guy. I think he was the one in charge,” she said, “but I don't know how that works, really. They seemed to pay some attention to him, but he didn't help when they started getting unruly. And he wasn't sober all night, either. He started drinking just before the Dead Hour. Right after he got a comm. He seemed . . . worried, after that. Like he stopped seeing what was going on around him.”

“And he spoke to no one?” Trey asked her.

Another blush. Elena wanted to shake her. “He spoke to me, a bit,” Ynes admitted. “I stayed behind the bar for most of the night, and he was sitting there, talking half to himself. I remember he asked me a lot about life here in Novanadyr. The culture, he said. He wanted to know about immigration.”

Elena frowned. That made no sense. “What sort?”

“PSI, mostly,” the hostess said. “He asked about the local Syndicates, too, but he didn't seem as interested in them. Mostly he wanted to know what kind of a relationship we had with PSI, whether we thought of them as allies. It's funny,” she added. “When I asked him why he was curious, he said he'd always thought of them as allies, too. It . . . seemed to make him sad.”

A well of dread was opening in Elena's stomach, along with something else she did not want to examine. “How long ago was this?” she asked. “Precisely. Can you remember?”

“Let me look it up.” Ynes touched her comm and pulled up a calendar, scrolling backward. “A month,” she said. “Three
weeks and five days, actually. But what does this have to do with Danny?”

Elena shook her head, unable to speak, and looked at Trey. He was still watching Ynes, but he kept his fingers on her skin, and she had to resist the urge to grasp his hand. MacBride had been talking about PSI in a public bar less than twenty hours before they had been attacked by a PSI ship. She didn't like the man, but he was no fool. How classified could his orders have been? How classified could the result of his trip out to the wormhole really be? What had really happened out there?

And how much had Greg not told her?

“We are not at all sure which events are relevant,” Trey was telling her smoothly. “But we must follow what trails we have. When did Danny leave?”

Ynes looked suddenly crushed, and sympathy almost pulled Elena out of her haze. “It was still the Dead Hour,” she said, her voice quiet. “His comm went off.”

“Do you know who he spoke to?”

“I don't know. He wasn't happy, though. Very cagey with whoever it was.”

“No vid, then?”

“It's not widely used here, especially for local comms,” Ynes told them.

It would only be local comms, Elena realized, that they could enable with the grid down—low-tech, short-range wireless. She blinked aside her numbness and tried to focus. “Can you tell me what you remember about the comm? Even if it seems meaningless to you?”

Ynes frowned, concentrating. “He was irritated when the signal came through, I remember that. Waited to answer it. He
spoke politely, but he was . . . detached. I wondered for a minute if it was his girl tracking him down, but he seemed a little cool for that. Then I wondered if he'd had one of his friends call him, so he'd have an excuse to leave.”

“He wasn't like that,” Elena said reflexively. “He'd have left if he wanted to, and been honest about it.”

And yet, she did not know if even that was true. Before everything had fallen apart between them, she would have stood up for his character to anyone, even Greg. Afterward, she had gone over every word he had ever said to her. She had not thought herself easy to deceive—and yet she had been. She had thought Danny's deception had been an act of desperation, and not who he was, not really. Just as she had tried to tell herself Greg's anger, his exclusion, was due to something unrelated, something that had nothing to do with her. That if there was something important going on, Greg would become himself again, would tell her what she needed to know.

She had been a damn fool.

“He said it'd be quick, that he'd be back before the hour was up,” Ynes told her. “When he didn't come back—well, it happens. I'm usually careful, but it still happens sometimes. Even so—I cried,” she said, embarrassed. “Not a lot. But I hid in the bathroom and let go for a few minutes. It had seemed different with him.”

Elena's mind flashed a picture: Danny and Ynes, in one of the lovely row houses Volhynia built overlooking the sea, a herd of yellow-haired children running through the yard. He would have none of that now, with anyone. She looked away.

Trey asked Ynes if she could give him a list of everyone who was there the night before, and Elena thought his goal had been
to get her to leave. Elena watched her cross the room, a good-hearted, obtuse young woman. She was caught between the desire to put her arms around her—reassuring her she could not have known, that she was not responsible for what happened—and shaking her until her teeth bounced right out of her head. Surely there was something she could have said: she could have warned Danny of the danger, seduced him to keep him in the bar . . . anything other than stand there like a scorned schoolgirl while he wandered off, unconcerned, to his death.

Her hands felt cold and she clasped them together, rubbing her fingers. No, Ynes could not have warned Danny. She could not have known anything. Elena, on the other hand . . . no, not even she could have saved him. Her pathological liar of a lover, who she always thought was too stupid to fool her. If she had met him here, it would have been her, and not sweet, innocent Ynes, who let him go off to meet a stranger.

Trey broke into her thoughts. “You said your ship came here in lieu of
Demeter.
”

Twenty-five of them,
Elena thought.
Twenty-five of those people on
my ship. “This trade drop was their scheduled mission. That earlier trip—that was something else.”

He waited until she was looking at him to answer. “I believe,” he said gently, “that there is a larger plan here than you have been told.”

Well, at least he wasn't accusing her of trying to kidnap him anymore. “Greg would have told me.”

“You are sure of this?”

Yes,
she wanted to say.
Not just because he is a captain, and I am an officer, and he would not let me walk into this defenseless. Because I have known him more than seven years, and I
matter to him, and he would have told me because he tells me these things.

But she couldn't say that. Instead, she shook her head. “I'm not sure of anything,” she told him. “But . . . the man she was talking about, the old man at the bar. That had to be Captain MacBride. I think—Trey, I think that comm MacBride took was about PSI.”

She was saved from elaborating by Ynes, who returned to the table and opened a document before them. “There were sixty-two regulars I could remember,” she told them. “I am pretty sure this is it, but I couldn't swear to it.”

“Thank you,” Elena said, but she was not sure she meant it. She did not want to talk to astrophysicists, did not want to rummage through other people's memories of Danny. She was no longer convinced what he had done with his evening had anything to do with what had happened. All of this was madness.

Trey, fortunately, had retained his manners. He stood, and held a hand out to the young woman. “Yes, thank you,” he repeated. He sounded so sincere. “You have been a great help to us, Ynes.”

“Will you find him?” Ynes asked, her huge eyes, wide and trusting, on Trey's face.

Elena opened her mouth to say they would try, but Trey spoke first. “Yes,” he replied. He reached out and took the woman's hand between his own. “We will find him.”