The Cold Between (37 page)

The timer and detonator were easy enough to cobble together. She tested the mechanism once, shooting a little jolt of electricity into the trigger's main controls. “Not my prettiest work,” she admitted, looking at the jumbled row of connectors, “but solid.” Jake had always told her beauty was optional; it was how well something worked that mattered. She always heard subtext when he said that. “How much wire have you got?”

“About a thousand meters,” Greg replied, “if we tie it all together. Will that get us to the bottom?”

“It will get us close enough so that it won't break if it drops,” she said, picking up her messy blocks of work. “No time like the present,” she said.

“I will not go,” Stoya said. His voice was thin.

Greg opened his mouth, but Trey spoke first. “I will watch him,” he said. “Be quick.”

An act of faith, she thought, or perhaps an acknowledgment that Greg really would kill Stoya if he could. On impulse she pressed her masked face against Trey's to kiss him on the cheek. “If we are not back in five minutes, get off the planet as fast as you can.”

She jogged down the hall, Greg in step with her. She handed him the timer, and as they ran, she fixed the trigger mechanism to one end of the wire.

“How long do you figure?” he asked.

“That's a good question,” she replied. “I want to give us time to get away, but as soon as we show up on the other end of that wormhole—”

“—the whole fucking sector will be clamoring to dive through. So either someone gets back here in time to stop the
detonation, or a lot of people die.” He shook his head. “What do you figure our chances are?”

“We'll make it,” she said with certainty. They came to the ledge, and she turned; Greg was looking incredulous. “You gonna bust me if I'm wrong?” she asked.

Much to her astonishment he laughed. “You've got a point, Chief. Okay, we get out of this intact. The whole mission is a cakewalk.”

“And when we've fucked up all of Shadow Ops' plans, nobody fires us.” She pulled out the microscopic spanner and wedged it carefully into the casing of one of the isotope cubes. “You really think it's only them?”

“I can't believe so many officers could lie to me for so long,” he said. “It's possible, of course. But I don't think I'm that easy to fool.”

“Someone already knows, though.” She set the receiver on the trigger, then gave the cube a tug to test the strength of the wire. Stepping to the end of the ledge, she dropped it over, and began to let the coils of wire out. “Someone has known all along. If S-O wanted to do something, why didn't they do it twenty-five years ago?” She handed him the timer. “Let me know if it loses contact with the trigger.”

“What do you think Kelso said?” he asked. “‘Hey, everyone, there's a massive supply of high-yield dellinium on this planet'?”

“I'm guessing it was more along the lines of ‘Lunatics have killed themselves. Let's not do the same thing.'”

“He should have blown the wormhole on this side,” Greg said. “Four hundred meters.”

“Setting up a detonator without a stable isotope would be dangerous,” she reasoned. “The thing to do would be—oh, hell,
Greg, that's what he did!” It was exactly what she would have done, faced with nothing but raw dellinium and a destroyed civilization. “He brought some back, and tried to blow the wormhole from the other side. But next to the nuclear engine, the stuff destabilized.” She shook her head. “All of the lies and the cover-ups, all these years—and it really was an accident.”

He was silent a moment. “You remember what you said to me after Eindhoven?”

Good God, Eindhoven had been five years ago. Another evac, far less catastrophic than Canberra, but enough to give her flashbacks. They had evacuated thirteen people, and left more than three thousand behind to a local government that was turning toward dictatorship rather than allowing its people to emigrate. It had been the first time she had seen up close how much he took failure to heart. “Something about powerlessness, if I remember right.”

“You said the miracle of the human race was not our existence, but the fact that we had never managed to exterminate ourselves.”

“That sounds like the sort of pretentious Pollyanna bullshit I would have spouted,” she said. She would have wanted to make him feel better, and blind optimism would have been all she had to offer.

“You were right, though—eight hundred meters. But we will someday. It's just we all think it won't happen in front of us.” He began counting down, and when they ran out of cable he was at 1,024. She tied off the wire, taking the timer from his hands; he was watching her, his expression troubled. “This city, Elena—is that our future, do you think? Or our past?”

She looked at him. It was the first time she had really looked at him since their argument. There was none of what he had said in his expression, none of the angry, brittle stranger she had lived with for the last six months. All she saw was Greg, the man she knew, who had never, as long as she had known him, lived without dread. She had always tried to give him hope, a sense that what they were doing mattered. For the first time it crossed her mind that hope was not something he was ever going to get from her, or from anyone else.

“Not our future,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Because we won't let it happen,” she told him.

“So simple.”

“Yes.”

He looked confused, and she kept looking at him, willing him to see it, to understand. Maybe she was being optimistic. Maybe she was lying to him, or to herself. But that was the only hope they had of winning.

At last he nodded. “Okay. About time we got out of here, don't you think? We've got four minutes before we're all fried beyond help. Put two hours on the timer; we've got to be through the wormhole before it blows.”

The wormhole was the wild card. By
Sartre
's chronometer, the trip through had taken seventeen minutes, but the accuracy of that measurement was anybody's guess. And they had never ascertained whether or not there was a time skew—large or small—between the two sides. A time skew could render this entire endeavor pointless. “Seems close,” she said, rapidly keying in the numbers.

“The second we come out of there,” he pointed out, “everybody knows the radiation warning is bogus, and the wormhole is a two-way trip. If someone's waiting for us—some S-O ship curious to see if we blew ourselves up—the first thing they're going to do is head back here to see what we did. We can't give them time to shut it down.”

“I'm not sure we can get
Sartre
's FTL field working,” she confessed.

To her surprise, he grinned at her. “Maybe we can't, Elena,” he told her. “But if you can't get us out of this, there's no way out at all.”

It took her a moment to recognize it was a vote of confidence.

I
have misjudged you,” Stoya said.

Trey looked down at him. His voice had grown reedy, and he sagged against the wall as if he were unconscious. In fact, Trey suspected he might be unconscious soon, and he felt resentful of the peace that would bring. On the other hand, he would not have to listen to the man's attempts at psychological manipulation. He wrapped his fingers reflexively around the grip of his hand weapon and looked away again.

Stoya did not give up. “I took you for someone strong. And yet you allow your woman to walk away with another man. Perhaps you have simply grown old.”

“I think you and Luvidovich draw from the same bag of tricks,” Trey said.

Stoya made a noncommittal noise. “It was a shame, having to kill him,” he said. “But he was flawed. He could not see that the path to justice is not always clean.”

“You know very little of justice.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Stoya admitted. “I never ran after doing what needed to be done. But you did, didn't you?” Trey was silent, and Stoya continued. “There was no proof of your
story, you know. Your sister was not badly injured. Your mother had not been struck at all. She did not defend you, did you know that? She was perfectly happy to see you hang, so long as she was left alone.”

Trey knew all of it. He had known it before he struck his stepfather, and before he left home. He had always understood his mother's nature, even when his father was still alive, even when he still hoped someday she might love him.

“What I do not understand,” Stoya went on, “is why you joined PSI. You had so many options. You are a born killer, Zajec. You demonstrated this with your stepfather. All of those Syndicate traders you killed—that was wasteful, you know. You could have done so much with your talent, and instead you invest your life with a pack of idealists. I always expected to hear something of you: that you conquered a world, or perhaps took over the Fifth Sector PSI fleet. Instead, you will die a meaningless old man, remembered for nothing at all.”

“And what is your legacy? Murder and psychosis?” He looked back down; Stoya was staring at him, his expression ugly. “You will be remembered as a madman, Stoya—if you are remembered at all—for that is what you are.” He turned away again. “I am happy enough to leave some peace behind me.” He thought if he held on to the thought long enough, it might become true.

Elena emerged from the hallway then, Foster at her heels. “Two hours,” she said tersely.

“One hour, fifty-nine minutes, and twelve seconds,” Foster corrected. “Including the three and a half minutes we have to get off this rock. Let's get moving.”

Trey saw Elena's eyes go from him to Stoya, and she frowned.
He reached out a hand to her, and tucked his anger away again; she clasped his gloved fingers and said nothing. Behind her, Foster pulled his hand weapon, steadying it on Stoya.

“Staying or going?” he asked.

Silently Stoya climbed to his feet, pushing against the wall to keep his balance. He wavered, but ultimately stood unaided, and Trey felt an instant's disappointment. He turned away, and with Elena's hand in his he headed for the exit.

As they headed up the hill back to
Sartre,
Trey could not help but notice the bounce in her step. She had not been so buoyant when she had headed back to set the explosive, and a whisper of self-doubt returned. But when she caught his eye she smiled, entirely unself-conscious.

“There is always a moment,” she told him, “when the plan is in motion, and cannot be reversed. No matter how mad it is, there's something liberating about having made a choice.”

He could not help but smile back. “You are an optimist.”

“She is optimistic because she is a fool,” Stoya put in. He was becoming difficult to understand. “If we survive, they will kill you for this.”

Elena's eyes had gone hard at the sound of Stoya's voice. “They might,” she agreed. “And it will still be done.”

Trey felt a surge of affection, and pride to which he had no right. She was a warrior, this woman, and Stoya had no idea who he was talking to.

They came over the hill and within sight of the ship, and Elena started the engines remotely. “I'll do the external preflight,” she said. “Greg, you do the internal, and set up the decon.” She turned to Trey. “I'm going to check the feet; can you do a quick visual on the undercarriage?”

She set about examining the surface thrusters on the ship's landing gear while Foster opened the door and climbed in. Trey squatted, aiming his comm light at the underside of the ship. Under the circumstances, a preflight seemed a luxury; he was acutely aware of the explosives they had rigged. On the other hand, she was the mechanic. He had learned repeatedly over the years never to argue with his mechanics.

Something caught his eye, and he frowned. He leaned closer, examining the hairline crack running diagonally below the ship's engine mount. “Elena,” he called, “you should look at this.”

There was no answer.

“Elena?”

He stood, and turned.

Stoya had one arm around her neck, the other pointing her hand weapon at her head. She had her hands over his arm, and Trey could see how tightly she was squeezing, but she otherwise stood still. Trey's hand went to the grip of his own weapon, and Stoya shook his head. “Do not move, Zajec, or she will die before I will.” His bloodless face stretched into a grin. “I would like that.”

Trey had frozen. “If you do that,” he reasoned, “none of us will help you.” He was too far away to extract her safely, nearly two meters. How could he get closer? How could he get her away?

“I will take her into the hangar,” Stoya said, backing away. “She will turn off the timer, and then I will let her go.”

“You are a liar,” Elena said.

“
Shut up,
” Stoya snapped. “All of this is your fault. All of it. If you had stayed out of it, Zajec might have had a light sentence, mercy because of his history. But you complicated everything by
making it look like revenge, like that boy had been a rival. He was not worth it, you know.”

“He was worth a thousand of you,” Elena said, and Trey wondered if she was deliberately trying to make Stoya angry.

“He was a coward. And a fool. No one cared about the flight recorder. No one cared about that old ship and all the foolish theories. If he had left it at that, they would have let him live. But he thought he could be a patriot. As if it were not his own government behind all of it.”

“Central doesn't stage interplanetary incidents,” Elena insisted.

Stoya scoffed. “I see you are a fool as well. Shall I kill her for you, Zajec? She will be less trouble dead.”

“You will let her go,” Trey said. He kept his voice icy. The ship's engines vented out the back; could he use that somehow? “And I will agree not to murder you. Anything else, Stoya, and your death will be at my hands.”

Stoya laughed again. “I have always liked you, Zajec,” he said. “You are ruthless. If you did not have such a bothersome sense of honor, we might have been friends.” His expression hardened. “Back up and get on the ship.”

“Don't do it,” Elena told him. “He's going to kill me anyway.”

Trey saw Stoya's arm tighten around her neck. “He will do it,” he told her, “because like all the men around you, he is weak. Women like you, you take what makes men strong, and you call it love. There is no such thing as love. There is only helplessness.”

Trey caught it, an instant before it happened: Elena's eyes flickered to the other side of the ship, and he knew it was time to move. He drew his heavy, Central-sanctioned weapon, watched
Stoya's eyes widen, watched his hand clench against the gun, watched Elena shove his arm away from her, enough to shake his aim. Stoya's shot flashed wildly, and Greg Foster, from the other side of the ship, crashed into Stoya from the side. The captain hooked Elena around the waist and rolled the two of them to the ground, keeping himself between her and Stoya. By the time Stoya had steadied himself, Trey had his weapon trained on the man's head. Stoya still had Elena's gun, but his hand hung at his side.

Trey held his weapon steady. “Drop that gun, Stoya.”

Stoya straightened, his weariness apparent again, but this time Trey did not believe it. Stoya grinned at him, less enthusiastically than before. “I told you,” he said. “Once a killer, always a killer.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Trey caught movement: Elena rolling over, rising to her knees. She was all right. “I shall not ask you again to drop that weapon,” he said.

“It doesn't matter to you, does it, that I have answers for your friends that they will never otherwise find,” Stoya went on. “Or that I killed Luvidovich for you, after he stripped you naked and cut you. He could have done anything he wanted, and you could not have stopped him. No, all you care about is revenge, like a good murderer.”

Stupid, childish attempts at manipulation. He wanted Trey to drop his guard, to prove that he wasn't a killer, that Stoya was wrong. Stoya's opinion was not relevant. Trey was what he had always been, and Stoya was a fool to challenge him. The man had no sense of proportion.

Elena was still on her knees, scrabbling frantically at the ground around Foster as if she was searching for something.
Something was wrong. Was Foster moving? He couldn't tell, and he didn't have time to be diverted by something else. “You didn't kill him for me,” he said to Stoya. “You killed him because he was figuring out who you were.”

Stoya bared his teeth. “Come now, Ivan,” he said. At the sound of his childhood name, Trey straightened. Of course he was Ivan again. He had never stopped being Ivan. “You expect me to believe you feel sorry for the boy? As you stand there, ready to kill me for crimes I have not yet committed? That will certainly show your friends what you really are.”

She already knows what I really am,
Trey thought. And under the circumstances, he thought she might forgive him for killing again.

At the sound of the weapon firing Trey jumped, startled. The explosive shot tore into Stoya's side, through the radiation suit, leaving a bloody gap where his kidney and most of his rib cage had been. He dropped onto the silver-gray surface of the lake, that smug smile still on his face, even as his eyes went vacant.

Trey turned. Elena was still on her knees, the handgun she had fired—Foster's, Trey realized—discarded beside her. Foster was limp and still, and Trey could see her running her gloved fingers over his rib cage. Dropping his own gun, he stepped over to them; the tunic of Foster's suit was torn, the edges charred, and beneath it his uniform had burned and fused to his skin. Elena was trembling as if she were cold.

“I think he's breathing,” Elena said, her voice ragged. “The shot got him under his arm.”

“We must get him onboard,” he told her.

She looked up at him, and her eyes were wide and frantic. Everything else had disappeared for her, he realized: the del
linium, the detonation. The vengeance she had just exacted for her faithless ex-lover. The fact that she had kept him from once again being a murderer.

“
M'laya,
” he said, more gently, “the radiation. We must hurry.”

She scrambled to her feet as Trey slid his arms under Foster's armpits and lifted. The Corps captain was heavier than he looked; densely built, despite his thinness. Elena grabbed Foster's heels, and together they carried him into the little ship.

Trey helped her settle Foster onto one of the couches, then headed forward to the console, leaving Elena to retrieve the medkit. He slid the door shut, ignoring the remains of their preflight check, and raised them off the ground, shooting them upward. His mind went to the crack he had seen in their undercarriage, but dismissed it as moot at this point—if they stayed in the thick of the planet's radiation much longer, Foster would have no chance at all.

He keyed in a quick route back to
Lusitania,
then joined Elena at Foster's side. She had tugged off his hood and was pressing an analgesic to his neck, her other hand gripping the med scanner. As Trey crouched beside her, she said, “Without an autopilot, the ship won't compensate for obstacles.”

“
Lusitania
is the only engine signature out there,” he reminded her. “I don't think we need to worry about running into any satellites. How is he?”

“He's in shock,” she said shortly, “and he's bleeding internally.” Foster's breathing was fast and shallow, his hands clumsily clutching the air. Not entirely unconscious, then, Trey realized. “Sealing the outside of the wound will only do so much, and I'm not sure how much of this painkiller he can take.”

Gently, Trey took the scanner from her hand. Foster's blood pressure was dangerously low, but his brain scan clearly showed he was conscious. Trey laid the scanner down and pulled the liquid bandage from the medkit. He laid the vial down on the ground, and began pulling the charred, ragged edges of Foster's uniform away from the wound. It looked raw and oddly swollen, but the bleeding was slow. Most of what oozed from the area was sera. Elena was right; sealing the wound would guard against infection, but Foster would not last long enough to be killed by a germ.

Elena emptied the analgesic, and Foster's breathing steadied. His hands stilled, and he mumbled something. It took Trey a moment to recognize Elena's name.

“Be quiet,” she said shortly. “We're getting out of here.”

She sounded angry. Trey thought Foster should have opened his eyes; he might have seen the frantic worry on her face.

“Stoya,” Foster said.

“Don't talk,” she chided, just as Trey said, “Dead.”

Finally Foster's eyes opened, but instead of looking at Elena, he looked directly at Trey. For one moment, Trey could see into the other man's heart to the grim satisfaction there.
Elena may have forgotten about revenge,
Trey thought,
but you have not, have you, Captain Foster?