The Cold Between (32 page)

“I am having ideas,” Ted said slowly, “that are making me very unhappy. That weird ident, Jess—can you trace it outgoing?”

Good God, she should have thought of that herself. “
Galileo,
” she said, “you have anything outgoing on that weird ident signature?”

“Specify time frame.”

That would depend, she thought, on how much premeditation had gone into all this. “Start with a week,” she said.

“Seven outgoing messages.”

“From who?”

“William Valentis.”

“When was the last one?”

“1925 hours.”

“Do you still have it?”

“Message was not saved.”

She looked at Bob. “You know what else happened around 1925? The captain blew off the Admiralty and went after Lanie.”

“So what are you thinking? That
Valentis
is in on all this?” He shook his head. “That's a stretch, Jessica, even for me. This is our own command chain we're talking about.”

Jessica remembered something the captain had said. “If the Admiralty really believed that
Penumbra
had gone rogue,” she said, “they'd have had warships headed this way a month ago. You really think a PSI ship hit one of ours, and then turned around four weeks later and shot down our captain in an unarmed troop ship?”

“The simplest answer is usually the truth, Jess.”

“And how is that the simplest answer?”

He stood. “You're suggesting that rather than having been murdered by an organization we don't know and don't trust, he was murdered by his own people.” He did not seem angry, just sad and tired. “Jessica, dear, I'll help you investigate Stoya when all of this is done, but in the end, it comes to the same thing. The captain's gone, and we have to figure out how to live with it.” He grabbed the bottle off the table. “You'll excuse me,” he said, and headed back into his office, returning the lights to twilight dimness as he left.

Ted waited until the door closed. “Man's not without a point, Jess.”

“Are you suggesting we let this go?”

“Hell no.” He paused, and looked at her. “You said, earlier, over the comm, about Valentis. You
do
think he's involved, don't you?”

“I think the fact that it's not a crazy question means it's worth investigating.”

Ted glanced at his comm. “I have to get back. Limonov is inattentive, but not inattentive enough.” He put a hand on her arm, gently, and she had a moment to notice how kind his touch was. “You gonna be okay?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she said to him, and gave him a smile. “I'll hold up, Ted. You head back. I'll shout if I need anything.”

He squeezed her arm and then left.

Jessica looked across the infirmary. The time was displayed above one wall: four hours until the attack. She shook her head. If this were a cryptographic puzzle, what would she be doing? Validation. Figuring out which pieces didn't fit, and finding out why. No guesses, no intuition; just keep looking until the code unlocks.

“
Galileo,
” she asked, “that order from the Admiralty, to attack
Penumbra.
Was there a formal vote?”

“Yes.”

“What was the breakdown?”

“Five to four. Dissenters were Khalar, Herrod, Mitchell, and Yarrow.”

She frowned. She was almost certain Foster had spoken to Herrod before he left. What if he had said something to make the man start thinking?

She had met Herrod once, more than four years ago. He had scowled at her jokes and told Captain Foster he should keep her on a short leash. She clearly remembered the captain's reply: “I would, but she'd hack my bank account and steal my money.” She had been horrified until she had seen the gleam in his eye.

She straightened, deciding. There was no way to do any of this halfway. She supposed preventing war was worth destroying her career.

She walked out of the infirmary to lay out her theory in front of her boss.

Elsewhere

T
he flight recorder had been wiped.

Elena pulled up the waveform and began separating the channels, but she could see from the pattern what had been done to it. As she scanned through it, tagging spots where some of the data remained intact, Greg turned away. She heard him pace to the back of the cabin. He had come to the same conclusion she had.

Next to her, Trey frowned—he had recognized the pattern as well. “Wouldn't it have been shielded from an EMP?”

“It was,” she told him.

“Then how did this happen?”

“Somebody hit it on purpose.” Greg said it decisively, making it fact and not speculation, and she could not disagree. Nothing else made sense.

Trey turned to look at Greg, but Elena kept her eyes on the audio. No matter what Greg was dealing with, it was more than she could take right now. She needed steady hands for this work, and she was still shaking from their argument.

“One of her crew,” Trey concluded.

“Specifically,” Greg confirmed, “the captain of record at the time.” His voice sounded brittle.

“See the pattern at the edges of the damage?” She pointed it out to Trey. “Someone would have needed physical access to the memory core, and the ship would restrict anyone but the captain of record from getting close to it. Once they open it up, though—something small could do it. A handheld coil, even.”

“Why would Kelso do this?” Trey asked.

It was Greg who answered. “Because he didn't want anybody knowing what happened.”

It was incomprehensible. What could have happened that Kelso would have wanted to hide? “There's still data here,” she told them. “Bits and pieces, and a whole block from after the damage was done.” She sat back and frowned. “That doesn't make sense. Anybody looking at this would know it had been hand-wiped. He was setting himself up.”

“He did not expect to die,” Trey pointed out. “Perhaps he could have returned to it later and done a more convincing job.”

“Andy Kelso was a decorated officer,” Greg said. “It's a court-martial offense, tampering with a flight recorder. To even take the chance is career suicide.”

“He must have felt strongly about destroying the information.”

“Or he never thought he'd have to face charges.”

Damn, had Greg always been so irritatingly pessimistic? “Be quiet,” Elena told them. “I think I can play some of this.” She swept the waveform back to its most intact section and activated the audio.

The sound of a crowd filled
Sartre
's cabin. She could make out overlapping voices, and the mechanical sounds of a ship's
idling engine—healthy, she thought. There were footsteps, many running, and the monotone of the ship's internal comms. There was an alarm sounding, but it was not a critical alert. The voices themselves were not panicked: brisk and businesslike, certainly, but not frightened.

Elena tried a refining filter, and some of the white noise fell away. Voices became clearer, and the ship's comms came into focus: “—
seconds to detonation. Please evacuate the area.
” The
Phoenix,
she discovered, had been a baritone.

The voices continued, and she heard snatches of overlapping conversation . . .
forget about that? I'll buy you a new one . . . sixteen canisters, give or take . . . what's taking them so . . . think I'm planning on dying here while you assholes run off?

That last statement, made by a woman with a strong, musical voice, was followed by ripples of laughter, but Elena was brought up short by Greg's reaction. He stilled, as if he had stopped breathing, staring straight at the wall, and she knew whose voice they had just heard. Her anger at him evaporated.

The voices continued, unalarmed, as the ship counted down.
Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one
.

And then silence.

Elena kept her eyes on the waveform. “The earlier data is more fragmented, but it might tell us something.”

“Like what?” Greg asked. His voice was flat. “They blew the ship on purpose.”

“It sounded like an evacuation,” Trey said.

“That was a self-destruct countdown.” Greg was angry again, but she did not think he was angry with Trey. “If they
were going for the lifeboats, they didn't leave themselves enough time.”

Her eyes strayed over the waveform, taking in the shape of the sound. She frowned. “Wait,” she said to them. She magnified the end of the signal.

“Perhaps the ship was timing the detonation of something else,” Trey was saying. Greg was having none of it.

“No. It would have been phrased differently.”

She asked
Sartre
to analyze the signal, and discovered it agreed with her. She felt a shiver down her spine. “Wait,” she tried again.

“The crew would have known that, too, though,” Trey pointed out. “You heard them. Those people did not think they were going to die.”

“Who the hell knows? Maybe they'd all gone crazy. Maybe that monstrous thing out there fucked with their minds. Maybe it was Kelso, insane and homicidal. Maybe he killed all of them; that'd explain why he nuked the flight recorder.”

Oh, for God's sake.
“GENTLEMEN.”

They both stopped and turned to her, Greg looking annoyed; he hated to stop mid-tirade.

“I'm sorry to interrupt your wild speculation,” she said, “but I don't believe the self-destruct is what destroyed the ship.”

That left them both speechless.

“Look here,” she said. She pulled one strand out of the signal, stretching it until it spanned a meter in front of them. “This is the ship's audio. Here”—she pointed out the telltale spikes in the wave—“is where it was speaking. Look at the interval: three seconds, two seconds, one second, and there's the terminus.”

Trey frowned. “It's too close.”

She nodded. “I'll verify against the magnetic shadow, but the recorder is designed to stop as soon as the ship has lost a critical percentage of its requisite structure—essentially, as soon as it's irretrievably pulled to bits.”

“Maybe the timer was off,” Greg suggested, but he sounded unconvinced.

“Possible,” she agreed. “There's a little bit of engineering data here, so I can look at it to see if there were system flaws that might cause a discrepancy. But I don't think we'll find them, Greg. I think something else took the ship apart.”

He shook his head. “We're guessing.”

“Perhaps,” Trey said. “But it does make some sense. If we rule out—for the moment—mass insanity, or the criminality of your Captain Kelso, what we have are people who were speaking much as if they were evacuating, and who clearly had no expectation of dying.”

“We also have a lousy wipe job done on a flight recorder, clearly implicating a man who, at the very least, should have been too smart to do it like that.” Elena looked at Greg. He and Andy Kelso had had the same training. “If it was you wanting to wipe the recorder, how would you do it?”

“You mean besides not trying to blow up my own ship?” Despite his bitter tone, she saw him considering the question. “If I wanted to erase the record of my journey, I'd probably drop the box inside the plasma cooler for an hour or so. It'd flatten the whole signal. I'd tell Central it must have been the wormhole. It's plausible; that thing spikes all kinds of radioactive nonsense.”

“What would make you hit it with a handheld EMP first?”

“If I had no time. If I was going to pull a dangerous stunt. Do a quick wipe just in case, and take the time to make it look like an accident later.”

“So what,” she concluded, “would have been your dangerous stunt?”

He closed his eyes, thinking. “That was the self-destruct sequence, no doubt,” he reasoned aloud. “That's a pretty unsubtle tool. But the
Phoenix
was a J series, running a D10.”

Elena glanced at Trey. “The D10 was the last of the nuclear starlight hybrids,” she told him. “The J series included a fail-safe: the ship could be separated from the engine compartment. What remained would run a limited FTL field—it would have been a long trip home—but the self-destruct would have been designed to nuke the engine compartment separately.”

“So why not separate sooner?” Trey asked.

“They shouldn't have had to separate at all,” Greg explained. “Close off the engine compartment, the self-destruct does a controlled implosion, you maybe get a little bump. Maybe even a boost, if you're stuck.”

“The thing is, Greg, they were on the other side when this happened. Given what we experienced, I can't believe they didn't get sucked through.”

“Perhaps they did,” Trey suggested.

All three of them were silent at that. If the
Phoenix
had made it back . . . so could they.

But hopefully not in pieces.

F
oster retreated to
Lusitania
to sync the troop ship's scanners with
Sartre
's less sophisticated systems. Trey watched the incoming signal, manipulating the inputs in hopes of attenuating their interpreter enough for the two to handshake. Behind him Elena was still focused on the audio, scraping nearly invisible sections of the waveform, searching for something more substantive in the recording. He could believe she was a superlative mechanic; she had a persistence that was apparently impossible to shake. After all of the shouting she had just done, she had returned to this room and begun deciphering the damaged recording as if Foster's words had meant nothing.

They should have meant nothing. No, not nothing—good news. Her falling-out with Foster had been a simple miscommunication. Foster was not involved in any Central conspiracy; he was not going to pursue
Penumbra;
he bore no ill will toward PSI. He was simply a broken man who had no idea how to properly tell a woman he loved her. A woman Trey had known only a day.

“I didn't know what he was going to say,” she said quietly.

He did not look up from his task. “I know that, Elena.”

“Then what is bothering you?”

Nothing is bothering me,
he thought.
Nothing has changed. He is still your captain, and I am still a murderer and a fugitive
. “What does it change for you?”

“Why would it change anything?”

Irritation caught up with him. “I do not believe you feel nothing.”

“Don't tell me this has anything to do with how I feel.” It seemed she was annoyed as well. “Neither one of you gives a damn how I feel. You're stuck in your own egos, the pair of you.”

She was not wrong, and it changed nothing. His ego had always chosen the most inopportune moments to assert itself. He looked over at her. She had left the waveform and was glaring at him, her lovely face outraged, ache and exhaustion in her eyes. “Is it such an impossible question for you to answer?”

“You want to know how I feel?” She took a step toward him, dark eyes flashing. “
Pissed off.
Exhausted. Fucking terrified, and close to panic, and like I'm being backed into a corner and forced to answer questions
I don't even understand.
” She balled her fingers into fists. “
Of course
it makes a difference. Everything I thought I had, this relationship that I have leaned on for
years,
turns out to be something utterly alien, and I haven't the slightest idea what I'm supposed to do about it. And you stand there like some jealous teenager asking me to
choose.
”

“Do not put words in my mouth.”

“Is that not what you're asking?”

“I am not asking you to choose. I am asking what he is to you.”

She took a step closer to him. “That's fine. That's
lovely.
Because I do not know what he is to me, not anymore. I don't even
know
who
he is. But I can tell you this: if he came in here right now
on his knees,
Trey, I would tell him I am sorry, but I am not free. My heart is not free.”

That could not be right. He wondered if he was misunderstanding her.

“And if that isn't enough for you,” she finished, her face close to his, “then you can go straight to hell with him.”

She turned away, and he looked at her rigid spine. He thought she was shaking, and he remembered belatedly that he was not the only one who had been traumatized recently. But he was not quite ready to let it go. “Why?” he asked her.

“Why what?”

“Why me?”

After a moment he saw her posture begin to soften, her hands opening up. She turned around. He could still see anger in her face, and frustration, but he caught a glimpse of sympathy there as well. She took a step toward him again.

“Because you are kind,” she said firmly. “Because you are strong, and you are honest and brave and you stand up and do what must be done. Because you trust me to do the same. Because you've stood next to me through all of this, looking at me like I really am strong enough to do it. Also,” she finished, “because you make the best lemon hazelnut custard I have ever tasted.”

His heart warmed, and all of his insecurity washed away as if it had never been. “I am a foolish old man,” he told her.

She laid a hand on his arm. “You are not,” she insisted. “You are a man who has been through hell and who would like to go home. So let's do that,” she said. “Let's go home.”

He put one hand on her waist and she leaned into him, and he tucked that same stray lock behind her ear. It would not have been so hard, he reflected, being stuck here with her, had they been alone. With her looking at him like this, he thought he might even have made room for Foster, as long as the man knew when to leave them be. It was a wistful sort of madness, and he smiled, and leaned in to steal a kiss before they could be interrupted again.

He caught the flash through his closed eyelids, and opened his eyes to look down at the scanner signal. There were still data dropouts, but
Lusitania
had given them much better vision. Reluctantly he pulled away from her, and worked on focusing the scanner beam. The system was sluggish, but after several seconds it narrowed in on the planet's magnetic poles, and began methodically pulling fuzzy data from the surface.

Next to him, Elena was smiling. “Not blind anymore,” she said, and met his eyes.

Foster ducked back into the cabin. Trey half expected him to scowl when he saw Elena's arm around Trey's waist, but if he noticed at all he did not react.
Honorable,
Trey thought again. He wondered how many times Foster had had to watch her with another man. Foster moved to Trey's other side, looking down at the scanner output. “Better than I would have expected,” he said. Trey wondered if all the man had needed was one good shouting match.

The scanner was agonizingly slow. It had been running almost ten minutes before
Sartre
alerted them to a match: a massive power source near the planet's equator. Details proved elusive, even with Elena's attempts to clarify the information.
The ship did not have the intelligence to identify the nature of the power source, or even if it would be convertible for use with their engines. All it could tell them was that the source was large and radioactive.

“Is that the source of the planet's radiation?” Elena asked.

The pause before the ship responded told Trey what he needed to know.
Insufficient information to determine radiation source,
it told them silently.

“It has been a long time,” he told Elena, “since I have performed reconnaissance.”

“It's been a long time since I've flown onto a cold planet with nothing but fuzzy sensors.”

Foster shot them both a look, but when he spoke, his tone was neutral. “Let's see if we can pull
Lusi
's shielding over as well,” he suggested, and moved toward the back of the cabin to kneel in front of the same access panel Elena had used to dismantle their field generator. Elena shot Trey a quick smile, and slid out from under his arm to return to her waveform. He watched her, the blue glow of the display cooling her skin, and allowed himself to consider the possibility that he might make it home after all.