The Cold Between (4 page)

He brought his hand to her face again, brushing his knuckles against her cheekbone. “Are you always so kind?” he asked her.

“Only to people I'm in bed with.”

Her hand was resting on his rib cage, and he felt the heat of her fingertips and wanted to pull her on top of him. Somehow this woman was turning him back into a teenager. “It seems to me,” he observed, lacing his fingers in hers, “that you are not the sort of woman who should be finding herself in bed alone.”

“Now you sound like Jessica,” she said.

“She is right on the cure,” he told her, “but not the problem. You are a beautiful woman. Regardless of your ship's shortsighted population, you should be worshipped, not sent out to try your luck at a spaceport bar.”

“My luck worked out well this time,” she pointed out.

“I am serious.” Actually, he was outraged, but that seemed presumptuous. “This fool, that you were in love with. What happened?”

A shadow crossed her face. He had seen it before, in the bar, when she had dismissed the possibility of true love surviving on a starship; but either he had missed the depth of her pain, or he simply read her better now. “The usual,” she said, and he thought her lightness was feigned. “He lied, and I found out. I tried to forgive him. I failed.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Two and a half months.”

He winced. “Damn. I am sorry, my dear. I did not mean to remind you of fresh grief. Especially here.”

She shook her head. “But it doesn't hurt to remember it here.”

“I am your first lover since then.”

“Yes.” She smiled, and some of the wickedness was back. “You do not remind me of him at all. And that is a compliment.”

Just then he heard a sound, and realized it was her stomach rumbling. “Good Lord, is that you? Are you hungry?”

“Starved, actually,” she admitted, looking embarrassed. “I was too nervous earlier to eat much supper.”

“
This,
” he declared, “I can fix.” He sat up, and her hand slid over his arm to rest on his back. “On your feet, woman,” he commanded. “I must give you fuel. I have every intention of your needing it.”

She followed him out to the kitchen. He leaned down to retrieve his clothes, pulling on his shorts and handing her his shirt. She shrugged it on, not bothering to button it, and he took a moment to take her in. He was never going to be able to look at that shirt the same way again.

Shaking himself, he turned and opened the refrigerator, a cool draft escaping into the darkened room. “You have a sweet tooth,” he assumed.

“God, yes,” she said, moving in behind him to look over his shoulder. “What do you have?”

He retrieved his latest experiment from the top shelf. He was only on the second stage—he was still deciding whether to wrap it in pastry, or to thicken it and coat it in some expensive, off-world chocolate—but he thought, so far, that it was rather wonderful on its own. He pulled open a drawer to retrieve a spoon, and scooped a little out of the bowl.

“Here,” he said, holding the spoon out to her. “Tell me what you think.”

She took it, glancing at him, then gamely took a taste. In an instant her expression changed to something not unlike what he had seen a few minutes ago by the alcove.

“Oh my
God,
” she breathed. “What is that? Cream, and lemon, and . . . hazelnut?”

“You have a discerning palate,” he told her, pleased. “I've
also added a splash of rum, just to deepen the fruit flavor. I was worried it was a bit too much.”

She shook her head. “No, it's perfect. Lovely. Is there more?”

So he handed her the bowl, and they wandered into the living room, and he sat next to her on the couch while she consumed his experiment. “You made this,” she said, as she ate it all, bite by bite.

He nodded. “It is my profession. I am a dessert chef.”

“My goodness, yes you are,” she said. She scraped the bottom of the bowl and looked into it sadly. “I suppose that was all,” she sighed, and he laughed.

“There are a few others at earlier stages,” he told her. “Incomplete. I experiment, a bit, on my own.”

“Have you done this long?”

“Off and on, for about thirty years,” he told her.

“Was that your profession with PSI? Did you cook for them?”

He shook his head. “I was an officer,” he told her, deciding not to elaborate. “But Fyodor—he was our captain, and for most of my life there my mentor—loved to make desserts, and on the longer journeys he would always try something he had never made before. He would have me help him. After he retired, I kept on doing it.” It had been a comfort, one thing he had been able to keep constant after everything around him had changed.

“Is that why you came here?” she asked. “To be a chef?”

He paused. “In a way,” he told her at last. “I was born here. My sister has never left. Her husband died last year, and she asked me to come back and help her run her business. She has a café, so cooking for her made sense.” He felt a strange sense of relief, and of exposure; he had not spoken of Katya to anyone since he had come back.

He waited for her to ask why he had left, why he had stayed away for so long; but it was Katya that had caught her imagination. “Are you close to her?” she asked, with something like wistfulness.

He shook his head. “She was very young when I left. I wrote to her . . . but I was a stranger. Now she asks that I tell no one how we are related.” It was not the whole truth, but it was enough.

“Why?”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “We are not always thought of with charity,” he told her, although he was certain she knew it. “Katya believes PSI is full of evil, selfish thieves, running from their responsibilities.” He regarded her, suddenly curious. “I'm rather surprised you do not.” He had always assumed Central Corps collaborated with PSI only grudgingly, when left with no other options. It had not occurred to him that Central, mistrust notwithstanding, might recognize the value in an alternate approach.

The woman's eyes narrowed a little as she considered her next words. “I know what people say,” she admitted. “But I know what they say of us as well. There is truth and lie in all of it. I may be loyal to Central, but I know enough to understand why some would want nothing to do with them. And given my own choices, people choosing to live their lives and raise their families on a starship instead of a dusty bit of rock makes a lot of sense to me. Out here . . . you may think I'm naive, but I have seen things. I have seen people starving. I've seen the remains of colonies that turned to civil war when they ran out of food. And I have seen people who have survived this fate, or dodged it entirely, only because PSI intervened when we couldn't. You are called thieves, and perhaps strictly speaking that is some
times true,” she concluded. “But I don't believe thievery is always wrong.”

It surprised him, her vision of his family, and he felt vaguely ashamed of his own assumptions. “I would not have expected a Central soldier to have such a subtle perception of reality,” he admitted. “I would not think you were allowed.”

She grinned, and her eyes danced. “We are not
all
bored idiots with guns,” she told him. “The truth is, out here we see everything. And on a ship as small as ours . . . we must all agree, at least on some level, about right and wrong, no matter what the regulations say. The captain follows the rules when he can, but he's also pragmatic. If it saves lives, he orders us to do the sorts of things PSI does every day, damn Central Gov, and he doesn't lose a moment's sleep over it.”

“I think I like this captain of yours.”

“You might, but for one thing: he has no sweet tooth.”

“I am outraged,” Trey declared. “Or perhaps I should feel sympathy.”

“I think it's wonderful,” she told him. “When they ship us chocolate, he lets us have his share.”

He laughed. “I must admit, you soldiers appear to be less different from us than I have thought.”

“Because of chocolate?”

“Because the pleasures of being human,” he said, “seem to appeal to us all.”

She drew up her legs and knelt on the sofa, moving closer to him. “When you said, earlier, that I would need the fuel,” she asked, “what exactly did you mean?”

He took the bowl from her hand and leaned forward to place it on the table. “I should have thought that was obvious.”

“Tell me anyway,” she whispered.

He leaned back on the couch and reached his arm around her waist. Wearing his shirt, one oversized sleeve slipping off her shoulder, her breasts peeking out from behind the buttons, she looked somehow more enticing than she had completely nude. “I should like to make love to you,” he told her, drawing her closer, his free hand finding her breast and hefting it gently. “Here, on the sofa. Or the floor, if you prefer, although my preference would be first one, and then the other.” She had crawled into his lap, and he kissed her once, gently, tasting cream and hazelnut on her lips. “I would like to continue this until the sun rises and the day reclaims us both.” He moved to kiss her neck, nuzzling the hairline behind her ear. “Do you find this suggestion agreeable?”

She responded by moving closer until they were hip to hip, and she kissed him, deep and long and satisfied, and he thought the pleasures of being human would be a fine way to pass the night.

Galileo

W
hat is the half-life of the radiation produced by the destruction of a hybrid nuclear starlight engine?

Captain Greg Foster read the message again, then turned away to look out his office window. The planet of Volhynia filled the viewport, green plains and azure seas dotted with swirls of clouds, the stars shifting behind it as
Galileo
paralleled its orbit. All planets looked beautiful from up here, he reflected, no matter what lurked beneath the atmosphere. One of the loveliest planets he had ever seen was Liriel, an emerald jewel in a stable, six-planet star system. But Central's fleet had struggled to evacuate the fifteen thousand colonists before the failure of their terraforming equipment had surrendered the surface to sulfur and methane. They had lost civilians. Few, in context, but Greg knew every name. He had been decorated for his work on Liriel, but he still counted it a personal failure.

The most important lessons,
his mother had taught him,
are the ones that go wrong.
At least whatever was wrong with Volhynia was not in its atmosphere.

He turned back and reread the question. Mathematically it was a simple problem, one every Central Corps officer was
expected to be able to solve without the aid of a computer. Depending on the size of the engine, radiation from the explosion would drop to tolerable levels anywhere from three to seven years later. That was a big reason nobody ran hybrid engines anymore; beyond the efficiency gains that had been made in pure starlight tech, the risks of failure were too high. Nobody wanted to block a travel corridor for such a long period of time, never mind irradiate a habitable planet. The hybrid design was inherently unstable, and nobody had been sorry to see it abandoned.

Curious, though, that only one Central starship had ever lost a hybrid engine. Curious that twenty-five years later, the site of the
Phoenix
's destruction was still too hot for travel.

Conspiracy theories abounded. Everybody seemed to think Greg ought to care, that he ought to seek absolute proof of what had happened to his mother's starship. When he was young, he had been caught up in unproven government conspiracies and rumors of alien invasion. He had almost let it destroy his life. Now he had been part of Central Corps for fifteen years, nine as captain of his own ship, and he had learned that the simplest answer was almost always the truth. Central did not have the resources for an expansive cover-up, even if it would have provided some benefit—and there was no discernible benefit to the loss of 456 trained soldiers.

What is the half-life of the radiation produced by the destruction of a hybrid nuclear starlight engine?

He swept his hand through the message, and it disappeared. “
Galileo,
” he asked, “what's the current radiation level at the site of the
Phoenix
disaster?”

There was an almost imperceptible pause as his ship queried
the larger net. “Current radiation levels at location 345.89.225,”
Galileo
told him in her warm androgynous voice, “are ambient 13, critical 22.2.”

Meaning you'd melt before you got anywhere near it. Greg put his thumbs over his eyes. “A nuclear starlight explosion nets what, sixteen, eighteen?”

“Nuclear starlight explosion yields are dependent on size, configuration, attendant materials, fuel levels, ionic—”

“Okay, okay,” Greg said, and the ship fell silent. Officially the
Phoenix
had not been carrying cargo.
Deep space exploration
had been her charter: the elusive search for alien life, which no one anymore thought would be successful. Boring stuff. Even the wormhole at the center of the
Phoenix
's patrol territory was uninteresting, the meager secrets of its unapproachable entrance having long since been exhausted. His mother, before she left, had seemed unenthusiastic, despite her love of space travel.

There was no data on the
Phoenix
's fuel levels, or anything else. Despite twenty-five years of long-range scans, the unique audio signature of the ship's flight recorder—which might have provided them with everything from engine status to last-minute comms—had never been detected, despite the extensive debris. The recorder should have had sufficient shielding to survive the hybrid blast. Yet another anomaly that had never been explained.

“Assume one-half fuel level on a sixteen-ton D-10 config. What yield does that give you?”

His ship answered promptly. “Sixteen point one seven, repeating.”

Greg did some quick math. Assuming the maximum seven-year half-life, the
Phoenix
's residual radiation should have hit
ambient eight less than twelve years ago, ambient four six years after that. “So here's a question,” he said. “What type of cargo might spike the previous explosion to produce radiation of fifty-six?”

“Armed hybrid torpedoes,”
Galileo
returned promptly. “Ellis Systems terraforming modules 16 and 45. Twelve kilos of dellinium ionic solids. Seventy tons of—”

“Stop.” The dellinium rumor was old, based on readings right after the explosion that had been corrupted by the nearby pulsar. Once the initial shock wave had passed, they found no evidence of dellinium at all, much less twelve kilos of the stuff. The
Phoenix
had carried no terraformers, and even if she had, Ellis had been a tiny research company at the time, not yet building heavy equipment. Weapons seemed the most likely conclusion . . . but then he was back to conspiracy theories. If the
Phoenix
had been hauling weapons, surely something, somewhere, would have come out about it; an exploratory mission never carried that much firepower.

There were no answers. There would never be answers. He should have learned to live with it by now. He
had
learned to live with it, even in the face of messages sent to him, year after year, by lonely and desperate people convinced the Corps knew more of the accident than they were telling. It had been years—decades—since he had given those theories any credence. And yet . . . there was something different about this message, sent anonymously, and the two that had arrived before it, spread over less than two weeks. He could not believe that it was coincidence that they had diverted to Volhynia, so close to the site of the disaster, at the same time as the messages started to arrive.
Someone knew something—was trying to tell him something—and he could not work out what it was.

It unnerved him to realize how easy it would be for him to fall into that abyss all over again.

After his mother died, he worked toward joining the Corps because it was what she had wished for him. He had been in the field nearly two years, barely a lieutenant, before he had accepted she had been right: he belonged here. He had saved lives. He had ended wars and transported engineers to repair failing terraformers and weather converters. He had made food and medicine drops, carted researchers and humanitarian workers to worlds where people were struggling to make the unlivable into a home. He had made a difference, just as his mother had always told him he would. Despite that, though, all he ever saw at night—as he lay awake awaiting whatever meager portion of sleep would be granted to him—was her name among the dead.

The low chime of his office comm shook him out of his glum thoughts. A message ident flashed before his eyes:
Adm. Josiah Herrod, Central Admiralty, Earth
. Greg frowned. A real-time call from the Admiralty, and vid at that: they wouldn't have allocated the bandwidth unless something was up. Out of habit he straightened, and felt a moment's relief that he had been avoiding alcohol for the last two weeks. Off-duty or not, he didn't want to talk to Herrod while he was drunk.

“Connect,” he told
Galileo.

A moment later the admiral's face appeared before him. He was seated at a desk similar to Greg's, but instead of stars, the window behind him revealed a span of green grass and the wall of a blue-gray brick building. The light was dim, and Greg was
not sure if it was early morning where Herrod was, or evening. “Admiral Herrod, sir,” he said formally, and saluted.

“At ease,” Herrod said automatically. Herrod was roughly twice Greg's age, although his gray hair still retained much of its original dark brown. He had a broad face, a broad nose, and a perpetual frown, and Greg had the impression the man did not like him much. For Greg's part he found Herrod too often stiff and uncompromising. Of course, this was not an unusual affliction for Corps brass who had been long out of the field, and it had been more than thirty years since Herrod had been off-planet. Still, he tolerated Greg's idiosyncrasies, albeit with less grace than some of his peers; and if he sometimes lacked subtlety in his decision-making, he had been known, when presented with evidence, to change his mind. He was not the most nagging of Greg's superior officers, and he had never been prone to vid comms across five sectors for no reason.

“What can I do for you, sir?” he asked.

Herrod's hands were folded on the desk before him, and Greg saw his fingers clench. “What you can do for me, Captain,” Herrod said, “is explain to me what you're doing loitering over Volhynia.”

Greg frowned again. Herrod would know; their presence here was official. “We took on
Demeter
's cargo on Aleph Nine, sir,” he explained. “Volhynia was the last drop.”

“I'm aware of the cargo transfer,” Herrod snapped, and Greg thought perhaps this was not some kind of test after all. “What I want to know is why you're still there.”

At that Greg became annoyed. It was easy for a man stationed on Earth to ask such a thing; he had no real idea of what life was like for a starship crew. But Herrod had spent time among the
stars, albeit decades ago, and Greg was frustrated by how much the admiral seemed to have forgotten. “My people have been out for nearly half a year, Admiral, and they haven't had a break since Aleph. You want to explain to me why you're using a live vid signal to complain about my crew taking shore leave?”

“You want to explain to me why your crew is taking shore leave when we're in the middle of a diplomatic incident?”

All of Greg's irritation vanished. “I'm unaware of what you're talking about, sir.”

“Your ship was briefed on approach, Captain Foster,” Herrod said severely. “If you've been ignoring Central's reports—”

“No, sir,” Greg said. His gut felt cold and hard; he knew what had happened. He should have dealt with Will months ago. “There have been some . . . internal communication issues lately. If you could brief me directly, sir, that would probably be most efficient.”

Herrod looked away, and Greg could see him weighing whether or not he ought to waste time taking Greg to task. In the end he stuck with the problem at hand. “We're on alert in the Fifth Sector,” he told Greg, “from Volhynia around the pulsar through the hot zone. The public story is that
Demeter
went in for repairs at Aleph because they were attacked by Syndicate raiders. In truth they were hit by PSI.”

Hit by PSI.
Greg could not let that go unchallenged. “That can't be right, sir. Someone miscommunicated something, or Captain MacBride is playing a joke that got out of hand. PSI's not going to hit one of our ships. Above and beyond the fact that they're on our side, we outgun them, sir, and not by a little bit. It'd be suicide for them to engage one of ours.” A cold fear struck him. “Are they claiming casualties, sir?”

“They're not claiming anything,” Herrod told him. “They're not talking to us.”

So it wasn't a joke.
Christ.
Relations with PSI had always been light on dialogue, but it had been more than eighty years since any kind of live fire had occurred between Central and the nomadic group. Central maintained bureaucratic structures to facilitate aid and distribution to the colonies spread sparsely throughout the galaxy's six mapped sectors; PSI preferred a more ad hoc style of providing assistance. Despite the humanitarian goals PSI shared with Central, their solutions were too different to facilitate camaraderie, but most Corps soldiers would never think of seeing a PSI ship as a threat. Something had set them off, and Herrod didn't seem to know what it was. “What is Captain MacBride claiming?” Greg asked.

“MacBride
reports
that the PSI ship
Penumbra
approached them adjacent to the hot zone, and fired on them unprovoked.”

“For what? Their cargo?” If Central thought PSI had been after
Demeter
's cargo, they would have made sure Greg was properly warned instead of simply loaning him twenty-five members of
Demeter
's crew to handle the shipment.

Herrod was shaking his head. “MacBride said they took their shot and then retreated. No demands for cargo, no comms at all.”

“But that doesn't make any sense.”

“No,” Herrod agreed, “it doesn't. Which brings me back to my original issue. We need you to be scouting for PSI activity in the area.”

Greg was already querying
Galileo
's sensors. “We're showing all four PSI ships outside of this vicinity,” he said. “Closest is
Castelanna,
but even she's six hours out, and she's not moving. They're all stationary.
Galileo,
what's the local time?”

“Local time is Dead Hour plus thirty-eight,” the ship said smoothly.

“What the hell's Dead Hour?” Herrod asked irritably.

“Artificial power outage,” Greg explained. “The colony's power grid isn't reinforced to withstand the EMP from the pulsar, so they take the waypoints down for about an hour every night while they get hit. It doesn't always save their equipment, but it keeps the pulse from traveling along their connections.”

Herrod shook his head. “They've got more money there than half the First Sector,” he grumbled. “Why the hell don't they update their grid?”