The Cold Between (33 page)

E
lena should not have been surprised to find Trey to be a competent mechanic. There were similarities, she knew, between mechanics and cooking; both required subtlety and precision, and both benefited from the occasional application of intuition. Besides, he had been in command of his own ship for decades; every decent captain knew, at the very least, how to make basic repairs. Greg was a fine mechanic himself. Jake used to say mournfully that he would have been excellent if he hadn't strayed into command.

Greg was patching together the remnants of the two ships' shielding systems, absorbed in his own thoughts, and Elena kept her eyes on the work in front of her. He had not spoken often of his mother, but Elena knew the woman was behind his choice of career, that she had steered him toward the Corps since he was a baby. And then she had been taken from him by the Corps, and he had not changed any of his plans. What his mother had given him, more than a direction, was a well of emptiness, of insatiable loneliness, that he expended a huge amount of energy hiding from everyone around him. Elena had glimpsed it, once
or twice, and the familiarity of that feeling had been a part of what had brought her close to him. It had been hard not to want to do something, to keep him company, to comfort him.

Since the day I met you,
he had said. What the hell was she supposed to do with that?

“Some last words,” Greg said.

It took her a moment to figure out what he meant. They were almost certainly not his mother's last words, but she understood. “She made them laugh,” she pointed out. “Because of her they were not afraid.”

“They should have been,” he said bluntly. “I didn't remember what she sounded like. I lost that memory a long time ago. But when I heard her voice—I knew it instantly. I can't believe I forgot.”

“You were twelve years old.”

“She was my mother. Shouldn't I remember my mother? All the stupid shit floating around in my head that I wouldn't miss.”

Elena could not share with him her opinion of his mother. She thought PSI had it right: it was madness, leaving children behind. She wondered then if that was why Greg had never had children. She had always supposed he had not wanted them, but perhaps he simply refused to re-create history with children of his own. “You remember what counts,” she said, knowing it was useless.

“Yeah, like how much I have her temper.”

“And her intellect,” Elena added, “and her courage.”

He watched her fingers. “I've never stopped being angry with her,” he said. “Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it, being angry with someone who's dead?”

“Sense has very little to do with it. I'm still mad at Jake.”

He was silent for a moment. She found a larger chunk of data, and set the ship about interpolating what it could. “I would have given you the job anyway,” he said awkwardly.

Well,
she thought,
it's probably the safest place to start.
“You don't have to say that, Greg.”

“Yes, I do.” He was looking at her, and she stopped what she was doing to warily meet his eyes. “Elena, after he died, and I told you I needed you to take his job, you looked . . . you shrank. Like I had just tied a boulder around your ankle. With everything else you were dealing with . . . I wanted to give you confidence. I wanted you to know that he had always believed in you. I thought it would help. But it wouldn't have mattered what Jake said; I gave you that job because I knew you could do it.”

“Ted has three years on me,” she said.

“And he's very good,” Greg agreed. “Next to anyone else it would have been him, no contest. But he doesn't have your instincts, Elena. And people don't follow him the way they follow you.”

“They are good people, Greg. They'd follow him without question.”

“They are, and they would. You don't have to tell me I have the best crew in the galaxy. But you? They follow you not just because it's their duty. They follow you because they want to please you. They love you.”

Elena wondered, not for the first time, how much he missed. “We all love each other on that ship,” she told him. “That's why it works.” He should know that already. Unsettled, she turned
back to the waveform. “Have a look at this bit—I think it might be audible.”

Trey got up from his seat to stand next to her. Instinctively she reached out and touched the small of his back with her fingertips; he slid an arm around her waist, almost absently, and she shifted closer to him. As long as she had him, she had balance.

On her other side, Greg was ignoring Trey's gesture, and she felt a flicker of relief.

The signal had the tinny sound of something badly reconstituted, but enough of it was intelligible. “. . . sonal log, 3190.2 . . . robably shouldn't have done it.” The voice was a man's, baritone like the ship, with the same sharp-edged accent most Earth dwellers had. “It was a terrible risk, on top of everything else here. But I . . . talk to someone. I'm the jolly guy in all of this, the one who's certain, who calls all the shots. I tried . . . voting, and of course they all agreed. Even Katie. I would've . . . all we could do with it, but she said she knows people too well. So I know it was the right choice. No regrets, no . . . it's going to take us months to get back without the mains, and I had to tell someone. He won't . . . one else, and when I get home I'm letting him get drunk on every centime I've socked away. And then maybe I'll hang it up, stay on Earth, let someone else face the horrors of the universe. I am tired. All this . . . more than I ever wanted to know. Wish it was a surprise, that we could do this to ourselves. Maybe I'm just getting old.”

The signal degraded into noise, and Elena shut it off. Trey looked over at her, and she met his eyes.

“Not suicide, then,” he said. He looked relieved.

“Or homicide.”

Greg was frowning intently. “Can you tell where they were when that was recorded?”

She lined up the audio with the recorder's magnetic shadow. “Incoming telemetry suggests they were receiving the stream, at least.”

“So they were on the other side,” Greg concluded. “And he sent someone a message. Why would he do that? Careful enough to wipe the flight recorder, and he spills the whole thing over comms?”

“It means there was someone back home that he trusted,” she said.

“It means,” Trey put in, “there is someone back on Earth who knows the truth of what happened, and has known all along.”

There was nothing else useful on the recording. Elena was able to validate the system chronometer; the early destruction of the ship was not a recording anomaly. The
Phoenix
had been trying to detonate something, and before they could do it their ship had been destroyed.

“What the hell were they blowing up?” she wondered aloud.

The three of them were silent. Elena glanced at Greg; he was studying the waveform, but she did not think that was what was on his mind. “You're investigating this wormhole,” he mused, “and you get pulled through. What's the first thing you do?”

“Same thing we're doing,” she replied. “Check out the radiation source on that planet, see if we can use it for fuel.”

“You think whatever he found is down there,” Trey said.

“Or whatever destroyed them.”

“That's the risk, yes. But what's our other choice?” Greg asked. “We need a power source.”

She felt Trey straighten next to her. “What sort of weapons did you have on
Lusitania
?”

Greg nodded, understanding. “The infantry took the plasma rifles, but we've got handguns.”

If any of the crew of the gray bird had survived, a trio of handguns would be a meager defense; but they were a good deal better than nothing. They would never be better prepared. “All right then,” she said, looking from Greg to Trey. “Let's go in.”

T
he last time Trey had made planetfall was six months ago, when he had returned to Volhynia. The transport had dropped through the clouds at the pole, speeding south over the mountains at Riga. It had been late spring, just warming into summer, a few yellow-flowered trees still dappling the emerald green, and his memory brought him back more than forty years. He had stared out the window, watching the ground speed underneath him, and the past that rose to greet him was not the pain of his last years there. Instead he remembered being small, walking with his father in the spring rains, laughing and splashing through the mud, and felt lighter than he had in years. No matter what awaited him, he was home, and everything inside of him knew it.

The planet they skimmed over now was dead.

Below the cloud cover the air was surprisingly clear, revealing a flat, featureless landscape. He thought at first that they were flying over rock, but here and there when the wind kicked up he saw gray dust rise and swirl before settling back into its nondescript place. They passed over hills, and in one place a
great chasm, as if some cosmic ax had split the surface; but there were no plants, no water, no animals visible at all.

Elena was flying, her deft fingers ready to compensate for turbulence; there was none.

The atmosphere was nominally breathable, but the radiation levels rendered it deadly. Once they descended below the stratosphere,
Lusi
had been able to give them measurements from the surface: ambient 6.1, climbing to 6.7 as they approached the power source. Upon hearing this Foster had silently passed out radiation suits, and Trey had pulled his on along with the others. Even with help from
Lusi
's shielding,
Sartre
's limited protection would not last them long down here.

Elena flew through the dim predawn, coming around to the planet's morning. The pale yellow sunlight energized Trey, clearing his head for the first time since his imprisonment, and he focused more on the landscape. Here the land grew more disparate, flat plains flanked by mountains, snaking channels that had at one point almost certainly been rivers. Trey queried their sensors repeatedly, but
Sartre
always told him the same thing: there was nothing organic there at all.

“Has it always been like this?” Trey asked softly.

Sartre
tried to calculate the age of the damage, but gave up.
Insufficient data to determine radioactive half-life,
it said.
Minimum duration: ten thousand solar years.

“A natural phenomenon, do you think?” Elena was whispering as well, her eyes never leaving the desolate landscape.

“When there used to be water?”

“Maybe an orbital shift,” Foster speculated. “Or a geological event. The power source might be a meteor.”

Trey knew he was right. The galaxy, for all its vast, empty spaces, was cluttered with all sorts of dangerous debris. Planets like Volhynia—or even Earth, for that matter—were blessed to have escaped serious damage. Impact was not necessary, either; he thought of Volhynia's normally placid little pulsar, and the chaos it had caused with a relatively brief deviation from its normal pattern. Not that he had been surprised to hear of rioting in Riga—his father had always told him Riga had too much money for its own good, and that the people did not know how to do without. Three days of doing without had been too much for them.

They came over a mountain into the full dawn sun . . . and discovered a city.

Stretching as far as he could see in three directions, it was as lifeless as the rest of the planet; but the buildings sprawled across the earth and stretched into the sky like fingers sprouting out of the ground. Elena slowed down and brought them in low. The buildings were laid out in grids, wide cobbled streets between them, their stone and brick facades catching the dust-filtered sunlight. Many of them were nondescript, blocky and utilitarian. He could see dozens, though, scattered wherever they looked, that were works of art: spires and colored glass windows, spiraled minarets, asymmetrical crystal blocks designed to look flat when viewed from an angle. There was one arched building that reminded him of Novanadyr's spaceport, but much bigger. They flew under the arch, and he peered at the underside as they passed, wondering what feat of engineering was holding it up.

She slowed, and they flew closer to the buildings, looking in through wide windows. Trey saw what appeared to be a
furnished apartment, items that might have been a table and chairs arranged to catch the morning light. The chairs had been pushed out and left askew, and the table was covered with unfamiliar knickknacks, but there was nothing moving. No bones, either; no life, and no death. The whole place felt artificial, wrong somehow; almost but not quite familiar. The word drifted through his mind:
alien.
A word used by jokers, by conspiracy nuts. Nobody believed in them anymore, yet what else could have built this beautiful place?

More important: What else could have destroyed it?

Ten thousand solar years.
He wondered where—or when, for that matter—the wormhole had dropped them.

“Do you suppose they abandoned it?” Elena asked, her eyes on the same window Trey was watching. “Perhaps they had enough warning that whatever-it-was was coming, and they packed up and left.”

“I don't think so,” Foster said, and Trey knew enough of him to feel foreboding.

He and Elena turned to follow Foster's gaze. He was looking down the road, in between block after block of magnificent buildings. In the distance, Trey saw something odd: a flat spot, as if the city had melted into a blank sheet of paper. He frowned and looked more closely; he thought he saw objects in the middle of the road, as if parts of a building had fallen off. With a chill up his spine, he realized that was exactly what had happened.

Elena had gone gray, and he stood close to her as she followed the road toward the debris.

At first they saw only minimal damage: chips in a facade, a door that had come loose, a broken window. But the destruction increased with each passing meter, and soon every building they
passed looked torn, as if the top stories had been ripped off by great talons. Soon they were passing piles of amorphous rubble, pieces of foundation visible here and there; and then they reached patches of glass, where stone and brick and metal had been melted and fused into something solid and shapeless.

They came across the lake almost abruptly: an expanse of silvery gray, stretching out toward distant mountains, smooth and featureless. Elena flew out over it, and in seconds the city was left behind. His eyes searched the surface for some trace of the civilization they had just left, some mark or shape or chunk of ruined building to indicate that something had been here, that the enduring beauty they had just left could not be so easily obliterated.

There was nothing.

He caught a glimpse of smoke in the distance. Elena followed his gaze and steered them toward it. He imagined she, too, had guessed what it was, and when they saw the remains of the gray bird, broken and scattered, she did not look surprised. She slowed down and hovered over it, her eyes darting over the bent and torn scraps of metal.

“You won't see any serial numbers,” Greg told her, but he was examining the wreckage just as closely.

“It's not that,” she said. “The cabin's still whole.”

Trey had not identified it among the ship's unfamiliar architecture, but when she pointed it out he saw a small, intact section, with an open door that appeared to be undamaged. Having the weapons from a Central troop ship seemed suddenly less like a luxury.

They sped away, and after a few minutes Elena found the blast crater, lower and deeper than the rest of the glass lake,
the bottom seared to blackness. A radiation alarm sounded and she sped up past it, climbing back into the atmosphere. After a few minutes they were back above the stratosphere under their own gravity. Trey felt exhaustion hit him again as they left the sunlight behind, but he had never felt so grateful to see the stars.

Elena leaned back in the pilot's seat, all of the energy drained out of her. Trey laid his hand on her shoulder, and she put her hand over his. She did not look at him, but her eyes dropped closed. He could imagine what she was thinking of, for he was thinking the same: every colony found too late, every war fought over wealth or territory or anything else meaningless. He had loved the part of PSI that meant helping people, but too often he had been left to witness what happened when a colony fell prey to its worst impulses. It felt like waste; it felt like personal failure; it felt like futility. Sometimes it drove him to despair.

Eventually it had driven him home.

Foster spoke first. “Was that the power source? The epicenter?”

Trey looked over at him. Foster had taken the shock of what he had seen and tucked it somewhere invisible. He stood now, tall and steady, ready to tackle what was ahead. He met Trey's eyes, and for a moment Trey understood him perfectly: this man, this captain, was doing what he had been trained to do. He was quietly and confidently pursuing his mission, and any doubts and worries would be his own. Gently Trey squeezed Elena's shoulder.

“No,” she said, opening her eyes and sitting forward again. “It was southeast of there. We flew over it.”

“So not a by-product of the blast?”

She shrugged. “I suppose it might have been something that was destroyed.”

“You think we'll need to mine it?”

She ran her hands over her face, and Trey saw her color coming back. “If that's fused glass, we could probably blast through it with a couple of handguns. Only one way to be sure, though.” She looked up at Trey. “Do you suppose we'll find what Andy Kelso found?”

He squeezed her shoulder again. “I think,
m'laya,
we already did.”