The Cold Between (2 page)

T minus 25 years—CCSS
Phoenix

S
ixty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

Kate ran toward the
Phoenix
's infirmary, grumbling with frustration. When she'd told Captain Kelso they could evacuate quickly she had expected more than five minutes' notice, and now there was no way they'd transfer everything in time. They had moved their patients and started shifting the most essential drugs, but she had fewer than half her everyday remedies, and almost no tools at all. At this rate, she would be practicing frontier medicine on the nine-week trip back to Earth. If anyone had a heart attack or a compound fracture in that time, Andy Kelso was going to be dealing with some injuries of his own.

She passed one of her clinicians running in the other direction, his arms full of vacuum-sealed pouches. “Last of the antigen packs,” he told her.

“I'll get the scope,” she called over her shoulder. “Stay in the res wing.”

“Aye aye, Chief!” She heard his pace pick up.

“Fifty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

She turned and entered the infirmary, frowning at the number of people still rummaging through the shelves. “Didn't I tell you people to get the hell out of here?”

Amy was shoveling topical healers into a bag. “Big bang,” she said tersely. “People will be bleeding.”

“Not if it goes as planned,” Kate reminded her, opening a cabinet and pulling out a portable medical scanner. Her scalpel kit followed, and she took a moment to strap it around her arm.

“What part of this mission has gone as planned?”

Kate was not the only one who laughed at that. Tension release, she knew; they'd all be less manic once this was over, and they had the long ride home to reflect. She would have time to digest what had happened, and figure out how to tell Tom the story without scaring the hell out of him. She didn't want to end up using all her precious shore leave dealing with his feelings of protectiveness, but she supposed it served her right for marrying a man who hated the Corps.

“Forty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

“Okay, that's it,” she declared, clapping her hands. “Everybody out. Now. That's an order. Move your ass or I write you up.”

The others tightened their arms around their loads of supplies, and turned to leave. Amy glanced back at Kate. “You coming?”

“You think I'm planning on dying here while you assholes run off?”

Amy waited while Kate grabbed the microscope. The two women ran up the hallway together, heading for the bulkhead separating the residential wing from the ship's main engine room and weapons locker.

“Thirty seconds to detonation. Please—”

“‘—evacuate the area,'” Kate and Amy finished simultaneously. They exchanged a smile and passed through the open bulkhead, following the long hallway through the residential area and into the main cafeteria. There they found the medical staff seated around one long table, strapped into the sturdy chairs. Raban, Kate's head nurse, had saved her a seat.

She would tell Greg all of it, Kate decided, no matter what she censored for Tom. Her son loved all of this just as she did, danger be damned, and he pestered her for every detail whenever she was home. She had felt from the day he was born that the Corps was his destiny, but now—twelve years later, watching him tread the line between stringy little boy and thoughtful young man—she
knew
she was right, in ways she had never imagined. He would be part of all this soon, and he would be the one bringing home fantastic stories for her.

She stowed her rescued equipment under the table and sat next to Raban, flashing him a grateful smile. He often reminded her of her son, although he was twice the boy's age: effortlessly handsome, with dark, thick hair and serious gray eyes. When Greg had been a baby his eyes had been blue, but time had drained them of color, and left behind a stormy shade streaked through with black. Exotic eyes. Tom's eyes. Greg had her fine features—and her mercurial temper—but he had his father's eyes.

“You okay?” Raban asked.

He was perceptive like Greg, too. She gave him a tight smile. “I feel like I've just abandoned my childhood home.”

“You could have said no,” he reminded her. “It had to be unanimous, remember?”

“It's worth it,” she said. He kept looking at her, and she made herself smile more easily. “Besides, it never hurts having a man like Andy Kelso owe you a favor, does it?”

“He already owes you,” Raban pointed out, but he smiled back, letting her off the hook.

“Twenty seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.”

Raban clutched the edge of the table, frowning as he looked around the room at people spinning in their chairs, running around and changing places in the last seconds available. “We work with idiots, did you know that?”

Kate watched the people she served with, the people who knew her better than her own family. “We work with people who know when to have fun,” she corrected. On impulse, she put her hand over his, and gripped it hard.

“Ten seconds to detonation.”

In the distance, she heard the heavy bulkhead creaking as it lurched closed. She wondered if it would hold; as far as she knew they had never used it before.

“Nine.”

There was a comforting
thunk
as the bulkhead locked into place, and she took a breath.

“Eight.”

She realized, belatedly, that along with her infirmary, the gymnasium was on the wrong side of the bulkhead as well. It was going to be a
very
long trip back.

“Seven.”

So many missions she had been part of, in her years with the Corps. So many causes, so many battles.

“Six.”

So many missed opportunities. So many mistakes.

“Five.”

But not this time. This time . . . they had been soon enough.

“Four.”

This time, they were right.

“Three.”

She thought of Meg, her daughter, her beautiful young woman, and what she looked like with the sun silvering her wild, dark curls. She thought of Greg, still mostly a boy, and the twinkle in his eyes when he was trying not to laugh.

“Two.”

She thought of Tom, her husband, her soul mate, who watched her leave time after time and still waited for her, patient and constant and full of love. Sometimes she missed him more than life.

This time, when she got home, maybe she'd stay a little longer.

One.

Volhynia

A
nother round, please,” Elena said to the bartender.

The man's expression did not change, but she thought he looked at her a moment longer than necessary. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. She knew what he was thinking; she was thinking it herself:
They've had too much to drink already.

Her eyes caught a familiar face in the mirror behind the bar, and she turned, singling out Jessica. Her friend was in her element: surrounded by rowdy, cheerful strangers, red curls bouncing as she laughed and joked with the crowd. Jess thrived as the center of attention. Elena wished she had more of Jess's confidence, wondering again why she had agreed to spend her meager shore leave in a crowded place where her dearest wish was to be ignored.

Because it was better than staying home
.

She had to admit that Jessica had done her research. Volhynia's capital city of Novanadyr was crowded with tourist traps, but Byko's, despite the crowd and the noise level, had an air of sophistication. The bar served not just the flavored beers so often favored by tourists, but also a wide variety of subtler
brews the colony did not export. Indeed, there were a number of local patrons, and even one man in a PSI uniform, drinking quietly at a corner of the bar, as serene as if he were the only customer in the place.

There were plenty in the crowd who were loud and stupid at this hour, but the atmosphere seemed upbeat, the music was bluesy and seductive, and the smell of fresh hops filled the air. Elena had spent interminable evenings in environments far less inviting, but the environment hadn't put the knots in her neck. No, it was not the fault of the bar that her nerves were so frayed.

Sitting here, amid the amiable chaos, she found herself wondering for a fleeting moment if she shouldn't have taken Danny up on his invitation to spend the evening with him instead. He had broached the subject just that morning, approaching her nervously after breakfast, palpably relieved when she had agreed to listen.

“There's this scientists' bar,” he told her. “Eggheads and weak drinks. Quiet, they say, although they'll rip you off like everywhere else in the Fifth Sector.” She had laughed at that, and almost said yes. But she did turn him down, albeit gently and with some regret. Now she thought he would at least have been someone she knew.

The locals, of course, had come out in force when
Galileo
had taken up orbit. Jessica hadn't warned her, but Elena realized she had been foolish not to figure out for herself what would happen. Volhynia was a well-populated colony world—there were nearly four thousand in Novanadyr alone—but there was nothing like new blood.

They knew we'd be here,
Elena thought irritably.
And they're hunting us like wildebeest.

Not that it didn't go both ways. Most Corps starships had downtime every twenty days, sometimes more often, but
Galileo
's crew had been six weeks without formal shore leave. Ordinarily they encountered something to shake up their fine-tuned routine—diplomatic crisis, terraformer malfunction, crop failure—but the Fifth Sector was largely prosperous and free of conflict. Six weeks of peace, it turned out, was mind-numbingly dull. Elena could not blame her crewmates for seeking out something—anything—that was new. Had she been a different sort of person she might have enjoyed this place with her friends, instead of wishing herself away from them, wandering her starship's wide, empty halls.

She slipped a finger behind her ear to query her comm for the time: 2350. Too early and too late. At midnight the city's power grid would be shut down for almost a full hour as the nearby neutron star swept the planet with an electromagnetic pulse. She would never make it to the spaceport in time, and she doubted the dispatcher would take kindly to her loitering until the lights came back on. Her eyes swept the crowd again, and she wondered if the dispatcher was open to bribes.

She had almost resolved to head for the spaceport and plead her case when she heard a step behind her. She closed her eyes, mustered a polite smile, and turned.

He was taller than she was, with straw-yellow hair and an indisputably nice smile, and he bore a heart-wrenching resemblance to Danny. Damn Jessica—what had she been thinking, sending this one over? She wasn't usually so oblivious.

“Can I help you with the drinks?” the man asked.

He had a nice voice, a little dark and grainy, with that broad accent they spoke with here. He was handsome, friendly, not
entirely pie-eyed—and he left her cold. As she looked at him, thinking of what to say, she realized she was done pretending to have fun.

The regret in the smile she gave him was genuine. “You're very kind,” she said, willing all the flip sarcasm out of her voice. “Actually, you can take them back to the table for me. I'm afraid I'm not staying.”

This news took a moment to penetrate. “You sure?” he said, still genial, still easygoing. “Your friend, there, she seems to think you could use some fun and games. Doesn't have to, you know,
be
anything.”

He was nice, this one. Under different circumstances, with more time . . .
he would still look like Danny.
“My friend,” she told him, “has a good heart and a deaf ear. If you think of it, please tell her to enjoy herself without being concerned for me.”

He flashed her that smile again. “If you change your mind . . .” he offered, then moved away, and she turned back to the bar to settle the tab. She was struggling to remember how much one was supposed to tip in Novanadyr when a voice came from the corner of the bar.

“You were very kind to him,” said the man in the PSI uniform.

He had not moved since they had arrived, seated comfortably on his own, nursing something served in a small, smoke-colored glass. He was dressed in black from head to toe, clothes fitted and well-worn, black hair pulled back from his face into a tight, short braid—the uniform worn by PSI in all six sectors. An anomaly in the crowd of tourists and natives.

“He was polite,” she replied. “There was no reason not to be.”

She wondered, as she had when she had first spotted him, if he was an impostor. Real PSI soldiers were rarely seen on colonies, living primarily in nomadic tribes, many of them spending their entire lives—birth to death—on massive generation ships that isolated themselves from Central Gov. Central maintained authority over colony worlds, supporting local government while regulating interstellar trade and rule of law, but PSI as a people kept mostly to themselves, appearing only to deliver supplies to colonies in need . . . or, as was rumored, at least, to steal necessities from a passing freighter.

On a wealthy colony like Volhynia, PSI would be seen as anachronistic, even threatening; a PSI soldier at a local bar would be an attraction. Or, more likely, a wasp to be provoked. But if he was an impostor, she would have expected him to be making the most of it: courting attention, and drinking a good deal more than what the bartender had poured into that tiny glass.

She waited, wondering if he would say something else, then finished paying for the drinks. When he spoke again, she almost jumped.

“May I offer you some advice?” he asked.

His pronunciation was clipped and exotic, his speech mannered and slightly slow, as if he was translating in his head before he spoke. Most PSI were reputed to be multilingual, and some joined as children, or even young adults. She would have no way of guessing on which colony this one may have started his life.

“All right,” she said.

“You should not keep company with children.”

He was staring straight ahead, not looking at her. He had an angular profile punctuated by a substantial, aquiline nose and a neatly trimmed mustache. A masculine face, and yet his lips were full, almost feminine. His eyes were wide and deep set, and in the dim light of the bar looked jet-black; but they caught light from all around, giving him an expression of intelligence and good humor. She could not, if asked, have honestly called him handsome; but there was something in his bearing, something immediate and physical that she suspected made people watch him even when he did not move.

“Are you offering me an alternative?”

At that he smiled, although he still did not look at her. “I take my own advice.”

The amusement in his eyes was not cruel, but she still found herself annoyed. “Do I seem so young, then?” she asked him.

“My dear lady, you
are
young.”

He had a nice voice, almost impossibly deep, with a hint of music. She wondered if he sang. “I'm not
that
young.”

He took pity on her at that, and turned to meet her eyes. His direct gaze was sharper, and she realized that whatever he was drinking had not intoxicated him at all. “What age are you?” he asked her curiously.

“Thirty-two.”

He gave a brief, dismissive snort. “When you were born,” he said, “I was well into my twenties, and I had seen more horrors than you will all of your life.” He turned away again.

By her estimation, she had seen enough horror for anyone, but he would have no way of knowing. “So if I am so young,” she deduced, “then surely I'm in the right crowd. Me and all these boys.”

“Possibly,” he allowed. “But these boys can do nothing for you.”

“That's not what
they
think.”

He scoffed again, still good-humored. “These boys believe that because they know the mechanics, they know how to make love to a woman. They are wrong.”

She thought for a moment, an old memory surfacing. “My cousin Peter used to say something about young men,” she remembered. “‘Too busy loving themselves to effectively fuck anybody else.'”

At that he put down his glass and let out a loud bark of laughter. She could not help but smile herself. “He tends to be crass,” she said, half-apologetic.

“Observant, though,” he said, favoring her with a genuine smile. She saw him focus, as if he had not really looked at her before. “Tell me, dear lady,” he asked her, curious. “Why are you here?”

Those dark eyes of his, in addition to sharpness, held a genuine warmth that pleased her more than she would have expected. “I thought we'd established that,” she tried, but he shook his head.

“You told that boy you were planning to leave,” he reminded her. “I believe you meant it.”

This time she was the one who looked away. “I came here because I promised Jessica,” she confessed, waving toward her friend. “She says I've been irritable lately. She's a big believer in sex to treat . . . everything. Irritability, exhaustion, insomnia, the common cold. She doesn't understand that it doesn't work for everybody.”

“So you came here to placate her.”

“I figured I'd stay for a while, then creep out to a hotel somewhere and let her yell at me in the morning when she's too hungover to put much energy behind it.”

“So if you are not interested in drunken children in spaceport bars,” he asked, “what do you do? Surely there are people on your ship.”

That was not a short-answer question, and it was a far more personal subject than she should have been comfortable discussing with someone she had just met. “Shipboard . . . can get messy. There's only two hundred and twenty-six of us, and it gets very insular. You either have to be serious, or casual like Jess.”

“And can you not find true love on board your ship?”

How easily he leapt from sex to love. Strange, how familiar he felt to her. “Sometimes.” She thought of Danny, of his crooked smile as he tried to charm her that morning. It would have been easier than she wanted to admit to say yes to him, to have met him tonight, to have fallen right back into everything that had gone wrong. “But reality tends to strangle it.”

She caught sympathy in his eyes, and braced herself, but he was perceptive enough to let it go.
Definitely not a boy.

“So on your ship you must choose from casual lovers or untenable affairs,” he said. “I can see why you were persuaded to come down here.”

“It did make some sense at the time,” she told him, relieved to have the subject return to the present. “In practice, though—my God, is there anything less alluring than a pack of strangers so drunk they won't remember their own names, not to mention yours? How do people
do
this?”

“There are alternatives to drunken fools, you know.”

“You already said you weren't interested.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, lifting his drink. “I'd forgotten.” But he couldn't suppress the half smile on his lips.

She began to understand what they were doing. “Story of my life,” she said lightly. “The only men worth talking to aren't interested.”

And at that they were looking at each other, and something inside of her turned. And she understood, in that moment, what came so effortlessly to Jessica in places like this.

She dropped her eyes, and saw him set down his small glass, looking back into the mirror behind the bar. “How much time off do they give you?” he asked her.

“Twelve hours, by the clock,” she told him. “I have to report back by oh-nine hundred hours tomorrow.” She took a breath; nerves had come upon her.

“That is not a lot of time,” he remarked, and she wasn't sure whether to attribute his tone to disappointment or disapproval.

“It's enough for some,” she said. “Usually it's enough for me.”

He looked over at her again, and she felt her face grow hot before she looked up to meet his eyes. His gaze, no less intense, had become serious, and she thought perhaps he was finding her unexpected as well. He shifted a little, turning toward her.

Without warning the lights went off, and a rowdy cheer rose from the crowd. Elena blinked, disoriented; the dark, while diluted by the bioluminescent sidewalks outside the bar's windows, was more absolute than anything she ever experienced back home, where the ship's operational lights were everywhere. She had forgotten to watch the time, and now they had hit the Dead Hour. Everything but emergency systems would be off-line for nearly an hour.