The Cold Between (12 page)

He knew this.
Galileo
was a Fourth Sector patrol ship, and was well thought of. He might even have heard people speak of Elena, although he could not remember.

“We were in at Aleph Nine about a week and a half ago. Provisioning and repairs. We were supposed to go to Shenzhu, give people some time off; we'd been out more than five months already, and tempers were getting short. Greg was barking at everybody, trying to get us out of there as quickly as possible. And then
Demeter
came in, limping. She'd been hit, on her way to Volhynia to drop cargo. They'd fought off their attackers, but they were going to be two weeks in port. Captain MacBride asked Greg if we'd take the delivery. As anxious as he had been to leave, I was surprised when he said yes. We took on twenty-five of their crew to help with the extra work, and a whole hangar bay full of food and materials cargo. We diverted three weeks out of our way for this drop.”

“I see the coincidence,” he said. “And I can understand wondering why they would need to deliver cargo if they had just been here. But surely there is nothing unusual in the attack itself. The Syndicates strike ships all the time—even here, although it is true they are rarely bold enough to hit a Central warship.”

“But that's the thing, Trey,” she told him. “The Syndicates didn't hit them. They are claiming they were hit by PSI.”

He opened his mouth to challenge her, but something in her face made him stop. Suddenly the idea of being deliberately framed for murder seemed a small and insignificant thing. “You believe this,” he said.

“I think Captain MacBride is an arrogant asshole who would happily lie if he thought it would save face. But that's the
problem. This isn't in the public incident report. It's part of his classified write-up. I'm not even supposed to know.”

“And yet you do.” There was something seriously wrong with Central's chain of command rules. “How do you know this?”

Her eyes shifted away, and he knew before she said it. “Greg told me, before I came down.”

“To convince you to bring me back to your ship.” When she nodded, he swore. “So I am to be Central's prisoner instead of Stoya's.”

“No.”
She looked miserable. “I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't have done it. He didn't give me a direct order, Trey. And even if he had, even if you'd wanted to come, I'd have told you all of this. I wouldn't have taken you back.”

He knew he was glaring. “You would use me against my own people, imprison me over some skirmish of which I know nothing.” He shook his head. “You should have stayed away from here.”

“I came back here to get you out of jail.”

“You came back here because you believed I was involved with the assault on
Demeter.
”

He saw her jaw set; he had made her angry. “You say you trust me, and now I'm a liar?”

He was aware of being unfair, of feeling unmoored, as if the world had dropped from beneath his feet. “You make this accusation about my people—my
family,
Elena, as much as
Galileo
is yours—and I am to put my fate in your hands?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to explain yourself!” he shouted. The other passengers glanced worriedly in his direction; he did not care. “I want to understand how you can face Luvidovich one moment
in defense of the truth, and then turn and lie so easily. I want to know how you can speak with such casual disrespect to your commanding officer, and then tell me that you trust him. I want you to explain how you could so easily feign concern when you are no better than the local police. And before you answer that,” he added when she opened her mouth, “remember this: I was an officer for
thirty years.
I have seen every kind of officer there is, including insubordinate mechanics, and I know a lie when I hear one.” He hoped that last declaration was true.

To her credit she did not look away. Her eyes were still angry, but when she spoke her voice was steady. “I have not lied to you,” she said. “I never thought you were involved. But I
was
the one who suggested to Greg that Central might not want you incommunicado in police custody. That was the only way I could think to get him to let me come back. If you had taken him up on the offer, I would have told you all of this while we were still here. All I wanted was to get you out, and get the police back on track. I didn't know they had no plans to find Danny's killer, and I sure as hell didn't know how
Demeter
played into all of it. As for Greg—” She took a breath. “Yes, I have been disrespectful, and no, there is no excuse that would withstand official scrutiny. I will only say that I trust that he would not have told me what he told me unless he believed it.”

And that, he realized, was what was angering him: not her inconsistencies, not his uncertainty about her motives, but the very real possibility that the story was true. All of his outrage deserted him, leaving behind gut-level dread.
Dear God.
“It would be an exceptionally foolish thing for us to have done,” he said. He wondered if MacBride had fired back, if he would have heard if anyone had died. “For this to be true—such an act
would threaten all of us. We are aware that Central has more firepower than we have, should we ever end up on opposite sides. I cannot imagine what might provoke such an act.” He felt abruptly old and exhausted. “I should not have shouted at you.”

“Of course you should have.” She reached out, and her fingers brushed his arm—a small gesture, of forgiveness or atonement he was not sure. “For what it's worth, when he told me my first response was that it's bullshit.”

“Which is part of why you think it may be true.”

She acceded the point with a nod. “I can't think of a good reason why MacBride would make this up. Scurrying away after getting shot at by PSI hardly fits the heroic image he likes to cultivate.”

“So you think this incident may explain why someone placed that poor boy on my doorstep.” He shook his head. “I do not like being convenient.” In particular, he did not like being convenient to Central. Stoya had position and power, but he was only one man.
Speaking of men in power . . .
“Why are you angry with your captain, Elena? It is not only because of me.”

For a moment he thought she was not going to answer. “He was probably the best friend I had,” she said at last. “And six months ago, he stopped being my friend at all. I don't know why. It's a loss, Trey, and I can tell myself that it's his fault, that he changed, that I don't deserve any of it, but the truth is I miss him.”

“So you hit him however you can.”

“It's not like it hurts him.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“. . . I don't know.” She sounded as tired as he felt. “I hit him because I can't stop hurting, and then I end up feeling small and
cruel, which is worse. And then he does something else, and I want to hit him again. It never ends.” Her next words were quiet. “I would not have let them take you prisoner, Trey.”

He turned to find her looking at him, and he flashed back to walking next to her in the cool evening, before he kissed her, wondering at this beautiful woman by his side. He wanted to take her hand in his, but he was already aware of how little objectivity he had left.

He looked away. “It is in the next block,” he told her, and focused on their approaching exit.

Gregorian's was on the outskirts of the city, a short walk from the squat, institutional observatory buildings. It was high enough on the hill that even inland it benefited from some of the sea-mist fragrance that pervaded the city, and offered a panorama of the skyline that attracted guests staying at the fancier hotels. Wealthy tourists notwithstanding, though, the observatory staff gave the place almost more business than it could handle. Ilya had told him he dropped by once or twice a month, but talking with a server the last time he was there led Trey to believe most of the regulars were there nightly. They served consistently fine liquor and good food, and if Trey had been more comfortable spending his money on ephemera, he might have joined Ilya more often.

Through the bar's wide front window they could see the staff preparing to open: someone setting up chairs and tables, someone behind the bar arranging bottles with long-practiced efficiency. A woman looked up from the front desk and met Trey's eyes through the window; she raised her eyebrows in question, and when Trey nodded at her she left her post to open the front door.

“Can I help you?” she said to them.

He remembered her: the bar's floor manager, a young woman, although likely not as young as her pale hair and waifish figure made her look. She had treated him just like any other guest, a trait he had learned to value highly since he had returned.

Elena replied to her. “I hope so,” she said, more subdued than she had been, and he recognized the effort to downplay her uniform. “I am trying to trace one of my colleagues—he came in here last night. I am wondering if I could speak to anyone who might have been working while he was here.”

Watching the young woman's face, Trey saw the exact moment she put Elena's uniform together with the day's news. Her blue eyes grew huge, and the practiced calm on her face dissolved. “Oh, my God,” she said, her voice wavering. “It was him, wasn't it? The dead man. It was Danny.”

Galileo

E
nsign Enkhtuyaa seemed like a nice enough kid, Jessica had to admit. She was the least standoffish of the
Demeter
bunch, and when Jessica had found her in the pub, she had been moving from table to table, grieving and commiserating with crew from both ships. Now she was sitting next to Ted Shimada, weeping openly. Jessica sat across from the pair, making sympathetic noises.

Jessica thought the girl was more angry than sad, and for that she could not find fault. One of their own had been killed, almost certainly by a civilian. It was intolerable. Joining the Corps meant fighting for something larger than yourself, being willing to sacrifice. An ordinary killer was an insult to all of them.

“I hope they find the bastard and fry him in the street,” the girl fumed through her tears. Jessica silently handed her a tissue, and Enkha blew her nose. “I'm sorry about the crying. I always cry when I'm pissed off. Not that I'm not sad, because dammit, he was a good guy. I mean a
good guy,
you know? Nice. Honest. Cheerful. But people die on this job. If I sobbed over all of them I'd never do anything else with my day. If he'd been
killed in action, I'd get stinking drunk and toast him all night. But this? Murder. Fucking
murder.
On some planet where they charge three hundred for a fucking beer.” She dissolved again, and Jessica handed her another tissue, meeting Ted's eyes over the girl's head.

“The captain'll get the killer,” Ted said reassuringly.

Enkha just glared at him. “Oh, really? That's not what they're saying. They're saying he's wasting time digging up dirt on that pirate that his woman was fucking.”

So much for camaraderie.
Even the least standoffish of these
Demeter
soldiers, Jessica reflected, was still an invader in her home. “Who told you the captain was digging up dirt?”

Enkha had unusually large eyes, and they lent her an air of innocence Jessica had always thought was feigned. “Commander Valentis said so.”

Jessica had not realized Valentis's complaints in the pub had escalated to undermining Foster's credibility. The shift made her uneasy. She knew the captain was not inclined to think of Valentis as an enemy, but this kind of talk was creeping uncomfortably close to insubordination, and it wasn't going to do anything to quell the rumors that Foster had been jealous of Danny. “The captain is just being thorough,” she said, trying to sound practical. “That pirate couldn't have been killing Danny while he was with the chief.”

“Unless they were in it together.”

One rumor or the other,
she thought, exasperated. “I don't think she was
that
mad at Danny.”

Enkha gave an indignant snort. “He was sure mad at her, though. Said she was all business, all the time, like he hadn't handed her his heart every day for two years.”

That sort of poetry didn't sound at all like Danny. “When did he talk about her?”

“Over cards, mostly,” Enkha said. “He'd drink too much and get maudlin. It wasn't good for him to be alone when he was like that.”

“Is that why you guys let him win all the time?” Jessica asked her.

Enkha looked surprised, and Jessica downgraded her estimate of the girl's intelligence. “We didn't let him win,” she tried, but she must have seen something on Jessica's face because she looked away. “Well, maybe now and again somebody threw a hand. We wanted to help.”

Jessica had been wondering about that. Danny had been winning more lately—everyone had remarked on it. But he had been playing more conservatively as well, and Jessica had just thought Danny was a better card player than he had let on.
Maybe a combination of both.
“Was it just the chief he talked about?”

Enkha shrugged. “Kind of, yeah. When he talked at all. Mostly he'd prompt people, let them tell stories. He was really nice about that,” she said, and teared up again. “He let me go on and on about my mom, and he listened to all of us about the attack. He even listened to Limonov.” She laughed a little. “Even
we
don't listen to Limonov. Danny was a good guy.
We
appreciated him.”

Jessica remembered Limonov from that morning, sitting at a table with his comrades, next to them, but separate. None of the others had been speaking to him. She wondered what he had been talking about with Danny.

Before she had a chance to ask, Ted spoke up. “You guys
have been running this sector for a while. Do you know Captain Zajec?”

If Jessica was any judge, Enkha was none too pleased to be pulled off the subject of Danny. “Not personally,” she said. “I expect Captain MacBride met him once or twice, but that would've been before I joined.”

“What's his reputation?”

She shrugged. “Aren't they all the same? Violent, standoffish, disinterested in anything we have to say.”

That didn't fit Jessica's impression of PSI at all, but she was aware some crews held a more traditional view. “Violent how?”

“They run down Syndicate raiders,” Enkha said. “Little ships, two- or three-person crews. They blow them out of the sky.”

“Aren't the raiders usually trying to board them?” Jessica didn't have to fake the puzzlement in her voice.

“Half of what PSI hauls is already stolen,” the girl insisted. “The Syndicates are just trying to get it back. Sell it properly, introduce it into the economy. They're not monsters, and they're not stealing anything.”

Well,
that
was a warped perspective if Jessica had ever heard one. Not that she hadn't run across it before; there were even folks on
Galileo
who were happy to see the Syndicate tribes pushing out of black and gray markets and into the legitimate shipping channels. Jessica, who had spent the first fifteen years of her life on a small, constantly hungry colony, was less impressed by this belated attempt at lawfulness. By her estimation, once a pack of thieving bastards, always a pack of thieving bastards.

But that perspective wasn't going to get Enkhtuyaa to talk. “So he hit raiders,” she said, and tried to mold her face into some kind of outrage. “What else?”

“Well.” Enkhtuyaa's outrage deflated a little. “Pretty much that. Sometimes . . . some of the PSI ships would sometimes help us,” she admitted. “When we were moving large shipments, or the couple of times we needed to shift some of the big Ellis terraformers. We didn't have a lot of emergency missions out here, which is why I don't understand why—” She broke off, and she reddened.

“Did something happen?” Jessica prompted.

Enkha looked at Jessica, then over at Ted. Her face took on a conspiratorial look. “Can I trust you guys?”

Oh, you poor kid,
Jessica thought.
The Corps is going to eat you alive.
“Of course you can,” she said.

“That hit we took, that sent us to Aleph Nine? That got us stuck on your ship, with all our cargo?” She glanced around, checking to see if they were being overheard. “It was a PSI ship that hit us.”

“No fucking way.” This came out of Ted's mouth before he could stop it, but by the time Enkha had turned to look at him, he made it look like outrage instead of disbelief.

Jessica resisted the urge to kick Ted under the table, and hoped he'd have the sense to shut up. If this little girl was telling them here in the pub, Jessica realized, the whole story was going to be out before the end of the shift. “What happened out there?” she asked.

“All I know,” Enkhtuyaa said, “is that Captain MacBride put us on alert, and the next thing I know the artificial gravity is fluctuating and I'm trying to keep our cargo from falling over.”

“Where were you?” Ted asked.

“Out by B1829,” the girl said. “You know. That wormhole in the radiation zone.”

Well, hell.
If Enkhtuyaa knew, they had all known. Ted, of course, was still behind. “I thought you guys were at Shenzhu,” he said.

“That was the plan,” Enkhtuyaa said. “At least as far as they told me. I'm just a cargo jockey, after all. But we were all pissed off, because usually we take liberty on Shenzhu, and instead we end up on Volhynia. Do you know what they charge for wine down there?”

The conversation ran off the rails at that point, as Ted expended some energy trying to figure out why Enkhtuyaa would bother to order wine on a planet known for beer. By the time the ensign finally left them to head to the next table—giving Ted a quick kiss on the cheek for comfort—Jessica knew what she had to do next.

“You need to introduce me to Limonov,” she told Ted.

He looked tired, she realized, and only some of that was holding up his end of their interview with Enkhtuyaa. He and Lanie went back a long way, and it occurred to her that he might be worried. “That could be a problem,” he told her, sitting back and sipping what she was almost sure was water. “Limonov doesn't like me.”

“Apparently he doesn't like anybody,” Jessica observed. “But he liked Danny. Can't we use that as an in?”

“It won't work.” At her look, he threw up his hands. “It won't, Jess. I tried, believe me. I poured on the charm from Day One with that crowd, and he was the only holdout. He's kind of . . . strange. Off-putting strange. They think so, too. They don't even know why MacBride sent him on this mission, especially as the senior officer.”

“What, no theories?”

He shrugged. “Limonov's a good mechanic, I guess,” he said. “And they tell me he and MacBride seemed friendlier after they took damage.”

“So, what—shared trauma?”

“Sounds thin, doesn't it?”

She stood. “Which is why I have to meet him.” He may have been disliked by his crewmates, but both Danny and MacBride had apparently taken pity on the man. He was smelling a lot like a clue.

They tracked Limonov down in engineering, where Lieutenant Dogara, the shift supervisor, had assigned him to test the calibration of
Galileo
's long-distance sensors. “It was the only way I could keep him out of the way,” Dogara told them, after Ted protested. “I'll double-check his work. But if I hadn't put him over there, he'd have done nothing but loom over people with that black look on his face, talking about curses.”

“Curses?”

Dogara gave Jessica a look. “You haven't been exposed to this guy for the last two weeks,” he told her. “Everything is cursed. The sensors are cursed, the engines are cursed. My grandmother is cursed, apparently. Also some types of sandwiches.” He shook his head. “I don't know what you want to ask him, but nothing he says is going to make any sense.”

Limonov almost certainly heard them approaching, but he did not look up from his work, meticulously matching the light metering on the sensor display with a set of equations displayed next to his head. Up close, Jessica could see that a lot of his dour expression was etched into the shape of his face: he had narrow,
deep-set, paunchy eyes, and a sharp jaw that tugged down the corners of his mouth. He looked up as they came closer, and she thought she saw a flicker of irritation pass over his austere features. He paused the meter easily enough, though, and turned to face them.

Ted cleared his throat. “Commander Limonov, sir. I don't think you've met Lieutenant Lockwood.”

“I have not.” His voice was rough, as if he had had some throat damage earlier in his life. He nodded at her affably enough. “Pleasure, Lieutenant. I'm sorry about your man. He was a solid fellow.”

That, Jessica thought, was possibly the most respectful epitaph she had heard about Danny all day. “Thank you, sir,” she said, then wondered how to begin. She had no angle at all, beyond the truth, so she began with that. “I know the two of you spent some time together, and I'm wondering if you could tell me what you were talking about.”

“Why?” Neither his tone nor his expression had changed.

She cleared her throat. “Well, sir, I'm trying to find out what he was doing before he was killed. What might have happened to him.”

Limonov turned back to his work, firing up the meter again. “You don't want to know.”

She felt Ted giving her a don't-say-I-didn't-warn-you look. She ignored him, stepping forward. “I do, sir. It matters to me, what happened to Danny.”

“You were not his friend.” Still even, still casual.

“No,” she admitted, “I wasn't. I didn't know him well, and I didn't try to get to know him well. But he was one of us, sir. You know what that's like, don't you?”

He was staring at the light meter, but she did not think he was really seeing it. “This is not a good business, you know,” he said. “The Corps. There are so many omens . . . and nobody sees them.”

It was strange, Jessica thought. Somehow she had expected raving. He sounded quite normal—if a bit inclined to bounce off-topic. “What sort of omens?”

He shook his head. “That wormhole,” he said. “There's something wrong with it. It took the
Phoenix,
and when we were there, it nearly took us.”

“I thought it was that PSI ship that clobbered you,” she said.

He did not seem surprised that she knew. “It tried to take the PSI ship, too. It will take all of us, eventually. The
Phoenix
was only the first. Captain MacBride—he knew before we went there. For years he was blind, but something opened his eyes. Danny knew. Danny was never blind. You want to know what we were talking about? He was listening. He was understanding. He was seeing the patterns, asking the right questions . . . and now he is gone. You think that is coincidence, Lieutenant Lockwood?”

“No,” she told him. That was the truth.

He nodded, approving. “It is that thing, that wormhole. It is dangerous, and we need to stay away from it. It will lure us to it, and one by one, it will destroy us all.”