The Cold Between (41 page)

Penumbra

E
lena gripped her seat as the ship's cabin bounced off the rear wall and toppled onto its side, skittering across the hangar floor. As soon as she felt their motion slowing she released herself from her shoulder harness, dropping to her feet. “Trey?” she asked, looking over at him.

He was already grappling with his harness. “I am unhurt,” he said. “Check Foster.”

She turned to where Greg lay on the floor and cursed, wishing they had taken more care strapping him in. She moved toward him, and light began to flare in the cabin. Instinctively she squeezed her eyes shut, wondering if the light was the FTL field or the wormhole exploding. “Greg?” she asked, as she heard the ship's stabilizers revving up. The engines began to sound distressed as they worked to match velocity, and she thought,
We'll fall right out of the field, or get tossed out, or it'll get ahead of us and pull us to pieces. . .

And then the flare faded, and the sound of the engine grew quieter, and after a few groans of annoyance it settled into a stable rhythm. She opened her eyes and looked out of what was left of their window to see that the landing bay door had closed against
the light. A klaxon sounded in the distance, but the mechanical hum of the ship told her they were out of immediate danger. She turned back to Greg, dropping to her knees next to him.

“Greg? We've made it. It's all right now.”

He did not answer, and she frowned. His breathing had gone shallow again. “Greg?” Her fingers went to his neck, and for one terrifying moment she felt nothing. When she found his pulse it was thready and uneven. She looked up at Trey, her heart back in her throat. “He's unconscious.”

Without hesitation, Trey used the pilot's chair to climb up to the ship's side hatch, which, somewhat miraculously, was still operational. He raised himself out of the ship, and she heard him shout in his own language, “We need a medic, now! That's an order!”

Elena's eyes searched the cabin. Everything had been tossed: blankets, couch cushions, most of the tools she had been using to cobble together their engine mount. Where was the med scanner?

Trey appeared next to her. “They will be here in a moment, Elena.” He took Greg's pulse, as she had, and she looked up at him to see his lips had set. “The blood loss, I think,” he said quietly.

“But—” He had been talking. Not five minutes before, he had been conscious and talking and part of their plan.

She heard scrabbling against their hull, and two people dropped in, one carrying a medkit. They immediately went to Greg's side, one opening the kit, the other giving Greg a quick visual examination.

“This isn't from the crash,” the medic said, turning her eyes to Elena.

Elena shook her head. “Pulse rifle.”

“How long ago?”

“A little less than two hours,” Trey told the medic. “He's also had severe radiation exposure.”

With far less care than either Elena or Trey had shown, the medic grasped the burned edges of Greg's uniform and tore.

Reflexively Elena lunged for her. “You can't—”

Gently, Trey caught her arm. “
M'laya,
they are helping him. Let them do their work.”

With an act of will she let herself lean against him, and he closed his arms around her while she watched the medics work on her old friend. Greg would not do this to her. After everything that had happened, he couldn't. Not now, not when they had made it through, not when she had learned all of his behavior was nothing but a reaction to his bad marriage. They would have time, she was sure of it, to talk that through, for him to realize that everything he thought he had been feeling was nothing to do with her, not really, and they could become themselves again, just as they had always been, unchanged. Because she had never really believed he could hate her.

Please don't leave me,
she begged him silently.
Please.

Minutes passed, and then the woman working on Greg sat back, looking satisfied. She glanced at her partner, who closed up the medkit and climbed back out of the shuttle. “He's going for a transport stretcher,” she explained, at Elena's anxious look.

“He'll be all right?” Elena asked.

“He's stable enough for us to move,” the woman said, and Elena hated the gentleness in her voice. “Doctor Lukaya is experienced with these sorts of injuries. He will look after your friend.”

The other medic returned, and Elena watched, useless, as they shifted Greg onto the stretcher with practiced care and passed him through the ship's hatch. The woman paused before she followed him out, her compassionate eyes meeting Elena's.

“You should come to the infirmary as well.” Her gaze briefly took in Trey. “Both of you. Being able to stand doesn't mean you're not hurt.”

Stop wasting time with us,
Elena thought. She felt Trey's arms tighten around her, briefly. “Thank you,” he replied. “We will.”

The medic left.

Elena's energy deserted her, and she leaned against Trey, feeling sluggish and unable to move. “He should have let Stoya kill me,” she said.

She felt Trey's lips press against the top of her head. “Is that the man you know?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, barely a whisper. “If he dies . . . I have no one.”

His arms tightened again, and she closed her eyes, dropping her head against his chest. “That,
m'laya,
” he said into her hair, “is not the truth.”

H
e noticed the nausea first, and only then his gnawing empty stomach, clawing for food he was pretty sure would not stay down. He lay as still as he could, waiting to fall back into unconsciousness, to retreat from the uniformly unpleasant physical sensations; but his mind, it seemed, was ready for him to wake up, regardless of how muddleheaded and uncomfortable he was. The nausea became more and more insistent, and without opening his eyes he lurched to one elbow and threw up over the edge of the bed.

“Welcome back, Captain Foster,” said a cheerful voice.

Greg spat, then opened his eyes. Standing next to him, in a jet-black uniform with long brown hair braided neatly down his back, was a man somewhat younger than Zajec. He was shorter and thinner with a far more facile smile, but something in his posture made Greg recognize him for what he was. “Doctor . . . ?” he guessed.

“Lukaya,” the man told him. His Standard was almost completely unaccented, and Greg wondered if he had come to PSI as an adult, or was simply good with languages. “You're ahead of
schedule. That's excellent. We weren't expecting you to wake up until tomorrow.”

The worst of the nausea had retreated with the vomiting, and Greg became aware of a burning ache in his right side. He lay back, and risked a glance down at himself. He was on a narrow, utilitarian hospital bed, dressed in loose black pajamas, his bare feet protruding from the bottom of a thin, warm blanket. He tugged the hem of his shirt up, and saw a red and raw patch of skin obscured by the light tan pseudo-skin of a liquid bandage. “How long have I been out?”

“Two days,” Lukaya told him. “You've missed nearly everything.”

“My friends,” Greg said. “What happened?”

“Your friends walked away from the crash,” the doctor said. “And they didn't need nearly the radiation treatment you did.” Greg thought the man sounded disapproving. “But you can ask them yourself, if you want. Commander Shaw drops by every hour or so; she's due soon. And in the meantime, you have a visitor.”

Greg looked over to the entrance to the small room in which he lay. Standing there was the only woman he had ever seen who was shorter than Jessica Lockwood. She was not young, but he could not hazard a guess as to her age: sixty or eighty, he could not tell. Her skin was unwrinkled but loose across her high cheekbones and strong jaw, and her braided hair, although mostly white, was streaked with red. Her most striking feature, though, was her eyes: bright green, sharply intelligent, with a gleam in them as if she were, somewhere in her mind, always laughing. She carried herself with a regal self-confidence, and he knew who she had to be.

“Captain Solomonoff,” he said.

His reward was a genuine smile, bright and dazzling, taking twenty years from her face. “Captain Foster,” she said, and stepped forward to stand next to his bed. “I am pleased to find you alert.”

“I'm pleased to be alert,” he said. He thought, in five or ten more minutes, that might even be the truth. “I'm not quite sure how to ask this,” he said, “but—I take it we're not at war.”

Captain Solomonoff grew more serious. “No, Captain. And when you are feeling better, I would like to discuss with you the best way to remain in that situation. I am not entirely clear how much of what happened was down to misunderstanding, but I do not believe it was everything.”

“Captain Solomonoff, I assure you, the Admiralty's official stance is—”

“I understand your Admiralty,” she said. “But I do not believe they are the problem, are they?”

Only in their impotence,
Greg thought. “What did you have in mind?” he asked her.

She shrugged, suggesting what she was about to say was of no significance, did not matter to her at all. He suspected it was a calculated affectation. “I am thinking it might be worth our while to be more explicit about our own official stance, and to ensure that we and your Admiralty are seeing things from the same perspective.”

It took him a moment to catch up. “You mean a treaty.”

That shrug again. “It is an imperfect word,
treaty,
but under the circumstances I think it is not inappropriate. But there is time for that, Captain. Right now, I believe you have other visitors.”

He had not seen them come in. Behind Captain Solomonoff, hanging back, hands on her elbows, stood Elena, sturdy and whole and unhurt, and suddenly all of his pain and nausea meant nothing at all. Her eyes met his, and she smiled, just a little, and he thought, perhaps, that they might someday be all right again.

Next to her stood Jessica, who was far less inclined to be reticent. She marched past Captain Solomonoff to loom over him, glowering. “Do you have any idea the position you left me in, sir?”

He smiled at her. “It's nice to see you, too, Jess.”

“Fuck you, sir. The only justice here is that you've survived to help me un-screw this up.”

There was that, of course: the lies from Captain MacBride, Danny's murder, the guilt of Volhynia's much-admired—at least by the officials who appointed him—chief of police. All of that would have to be sorted out, along with Ellis and what they had done to the factory. And there was the
Phoenix,
on top of it all, the final fate of a ship that had shaped a future it had never seen.

Elena, as she so often did, seemed to be following his thoughts. “No way of telling if the flight recorder got swallowed or destroyed,” she told him, taking a step closer, still holding her elbows, “but no one has asked about it yet. I imagine nobody wants to tell me they knew about it. I think they're waiting to see what happens when the radiation clears up.”

“Is that likely to happen?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “The pulsar helped last time; it might help again. If it doesn't, though—it'll be a long time. Maybe our lifetimes. We can't even tell what sort of state the wormhole is in. It's intact, but the radiation has cluttered all the readings. No
vanadyr Observatory is fairly drooling over the idea of trying to weed through all the chaos.”

Novanadyr Observatory, Greg thought, who'd had it right all along. “How's
Galileo
?” he asked.

At that, she looked away from him. “Ted says the engines came through brilliantly, even hauling two ships into the field.” She paused. “I haven't been back yet.”

He turned that over in his head. As much as he believed she had been worried for him, he suspected that was not what was keeping her on
Penumbra.
“What about Valentis?” he asked.

Jessica, who had been scowling at Elena, looked back at him to answer. “Commander Broadmoor has confined him to quarters, sir. Two guards, one inside, one out. They say he was yelling a lot.”

“You didn't watch?”

“I'd have had to hit him, sir.”

Greg laughed aloud, and then stopped, gasping at the stabbing pain in his ribs. Elena looked back at him, worried, and he waved a hand to reassure her. “I guess I can't do that for a while,” he said lightly, dizzy from the pain.

“You can do it all you like,” Lukaya told him. “It'll just hurt.”

Greg thought of Bob Hastings, and decided that doctors, facile smiles notwithstanding, were all alike.

I
t took them two full weeks to hammer everything out.

Foster had convinced Central Command that now was an optimal time to officially hash out a treaty with PSI. For the first week he operated out of
Penumbra
's infirmary, until an annoyed Lukaya declared him fit for travel. After that Foster spent his days shuttling back and forth between
Galileo
and
Penumbra,
in closed-door meetings with Valeria or speaking tersely with one of the admirals back on Earth. Trey had occasion to ask Valeria what sort of treaty they were trying to craft.

“It is difficult to say,” she told him. “We are in agreement about nearly everything apart from how the Syndicates should be handled, and I believe most of our differences there are semantic. But they ask for details, so we work out details.”

Trey did not think that was all they discussed. Valeria took at least one meal a day with Captain Foster, and Trey had caught the two of them chatting and laughing more than once. Clearly there was affinity there. Certainly Foster seemed much less the sullen, short-sighted hothead he had when Trey had first met him, and far more the charming and easygoing man of his reputation. Trey found that discovery left him with a number of
conflicting feelings; he could understand better why Foster and Elena had been friends, but this sophisticated, relaxed officer was a much more credible rival.

But he knew Foster was not the rival to whom he would lose.

Unlike Foster, Elena had stayed on board
Penumbra.
She received daily reports from Ted Shimada, but otherwise spent her days in
Penumbra
's engine room, helping with repairs. When she had volunteered, Trey had thought Stefan—Valeria's chief mechanic—was going to have a stroke; but he had silently set her to busywork, and after a few days had allowed her to help fix the field generator. His attitude toward her never changed, but he stood over her less and less often, and after the first week she was working entirely unsupervised.

Trey, who had nothing to do at all, eventually adjourned to
Penumbra
's main kitchen, and did what he always did when he was at loose ends: he cooked. He made loaf after loaf of bread, the rhythm of the kneading easing the tension in his head. He cooked taffy and hard candy, and make finger-sized éclairs for the small children. Within three days he had a line outside the kitchen each morning when he arrived, and he almost wished he hadn't started. It was too much like home, and too many of the children reminded him of Sarah. He found it impossible not to become mired in homesickness.

Predictably, it was Volhynia that proved the most recalcitrant. Despite evidence of Stoya's guilt and Ancher's video, they seemed interested in charging Trey for assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. Both charges could land him in the same interrogation room, and although he hoped their tactics would ease somewhat without Stoya or Luvidovich, they could still legally detain him as long as they wished.

In the end, to Trey's chagrin, it was Central Corps that came to his rescue. Someone named Admiral Herrod sent a blunt memo to Volhynia's government: Treiko Zajec, captain, retired, was to be pardoned, both for crimes they wanted to charge him with and for crimes he had committed in the past. If the government refused . . . well, then, Volhynia was welcome to see what would happen to their trading channels without the patronage and protection of Central Gov, who would cheerfully grant them their long-standing wish to secede and stand alone.

Volhynia's governor had responded by issuing Trey a personal invitation to come home. Trey had listened with Elena, and found he was almost incapable of watching the smug, nervous little man finish his message.

“Are you behind this?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Greg says Admiral Herrod did this on his own. Probably because he feels like a jerk for leaving you hanging out to dry.”

He suspected there was more to it than that. Even having spent forty years away from home, he was aware of the fraught relationship between Volhynia and Central. There was almost certainly a political motivation behind Herrod's generosity, but he could not imagine ever being in a position to do the man a favor. In the end, he decided to simply be grateful.

He and Elena managed to find time for more than sleeping. He had worried, at first, that Valeria would be bothered, but she had shrugged when he had mentioned it.

“Do you think I have been sleeping alone, Treiko, pining for you nightly? I am finding, the longer you are here, that I actually wish you happiness. Take what you can, dear boy.”

He could tell, from the sadness in her eyes, that she saw the future clearly. Captain Foster, on the other hand, did not. The more days that passed, the more concerned he looked, his eyes always following Elena when she crossed a room. Trey wondered if he ought to say something, but he did not think she would thank him if he did. Better to let Foster work it out alone, and take the time with her that he had.

They slept as little as possible, and apart from their daily duties they were rarely apart. They ate together, showered together, even exercised together, she pounding laps around
Penumbra
's short track while he lifted weights. At night they made love until they collapsed with exhaustion, and every day he felt more himself. She was warm and passionate and delightful and giving, and she lit him up from the inside, like fire spreading from his heart throughout his limbs.

The closeness was unsustainable, of course, but they sustained it just the same.

Castelanna
had appeared a few days after their flight from the wormhole. Trey had spent a pleasant afternoon reminiscing with Rosaria, but he had not visited his longtime home. He could have shown it off to Elena, he supposed, but returning there, even for a visit, would have felt too much like stepping backward. His time on
Castelanna
had always been tinged, however faintly, with penance, and he was finished with penance.

Elena did not invite him to
Galileo,
either, although her reasons, he knew, were very different. He believed she could see as clearly as he could and, like Trey, was taking what she could. He was not going to lose a moment of it by trying to make her face the future before she had to.

One afternoon Trey was sitting in his kitchen, reading a book while his bread was rising. Greg Foster poked his head in, and Trey shut down the display, waving the man inside.

“Can I get you something to eat?”

Foster shook his head. “I'll take a drink, though, if you have something nonalcoholic.”

Elena had not noticed, but Foster had not had a drink since they had returned through the wormhole. Trey wondered why the man would not tell her, but he realized Foster told her almost nothing of himself, assuming she would infer. Trey was beginning to understand Greg Foster, and he wished he didn't—it made him feel sympathy.

Foster sipped at the lemonade Trey handed him, then looked at Trey with those sober gray eyes. “She's a natural leader, Elena,” he said, as if they were continuing an old discussion. “Better than Jake was, really. Jake was a fair man, and a good officer, but he was kind of a social misfit. He didn't always communicate all that well. Elena, she gets the point across.” He laughed a little. “You should see these kids we get once or twice a year, fresh out of the Academy, or a year or so out in the field. She smiles that big, naive smile of hers, and welcomes them, and you can see it in their faces: they think she's a pushover. It takes some of them as much as a week to figure it out, and then they're scared of her. And either they get over that, or she transfers them out. She comes across as this sweet, shy woman, but on duty, my God, she's hard as nails. When she joined
Galileo,
I thought she'd be too soft for the job.”

“Even knowing the missions she had been through?”

“Even so. I got fooled as much as anybody else.” He paused. “I suppose I'm still fooled. But the thing is—Shimada's good,
and that's the truth. She thinks he should have had her job because he's three years senior. I never would have given it to him, even if Jake's wishes had been different. She knows that ship like nobody else. She knows
us.
She remembers birthdays, and how people take their coffee, and who lost someone, and who likes to dance on their days off. She knows if somebody's homesick, or if they need company or just to be left alone. She doesn't see it, not really, but she knits us together. We need her.”

“
We
need her?” Trey asked him. “Or you need her?”

Foster's jaw set. “You've known her two weeks,” he said.

“Captain Foster, I do not believe you have known her a day.”

Foster stared at him for a long moment, then silently turned and left the kitchen. Trey pulled his book up again, but could only stare past it out the kitchen window into the dark.