The Cold Between (28 page)

Galileo

J
essica had been six when her baby sister, too malnourished to fight off a cold, had died, her breathing rattling into silence in the night. She learned early she could never count on her friends to live through Tengri's hideously long rainy summers, and by her teens she had lost more aunts and uncles than she could remember to the ravages of insufficient resources. She had thought herself inured to death. Elena favored the idea that her polyamory was a result of choosing not to bond with people, but to Jessica, it was precisely the opposite. She loved too deeply to risk being alone, and this was the Corps. People died.

Losing Danny had made her sad, and she had been irritated with the strange possessiveness of the
Demeter
crew. Losing Captain Foster made her angry.

Valentis had assembled the crew in the pub; still confined to quarters, Jessica had to listen to his announcement over intraship comms. He had spoken with grief and sincerity, his voice breaking in all the right places. Jessica wondered when she had started hating his voice. But just when she thought she had heard the worst of it, he had more to say:

“A few minutes ago, we received orders from Central Command, directing us to pursue the PSI starship
Penumbra,
responsible for the death of Captain Foster. Central has also ordered
Demeter, Constellation,
and
Abigail
to join us. We will spearhead the attack; they will rendezvous with us at
Penumbra
's last known coordinates in eighteen hours, should reinforcements be required.

“I am sure the import of this is not lost on any of you. Central Command has declared
Penumbra
's attack on
Demeter,
and her subsequent murder of Captain Foster, to be acts of war. Our mission is to take
Penumbra
and imprison her crew, or destroy her. We should arrive in six hours and seven minutes. All crews are on standby; all engineering staff are on shift until further notice. We will avenge our comrade. That is all.”

He had taken a dramatic pause before his last words, and Jessica could not hear it as anything but artifice.

She sat in her overstuffed chair, watching the streaks of the field flit past her window. She should have gone with him. She should have told him not to go at all. She should have insisted Elena would be safe with her pirate, that he should come home and deal with it from here.

He would not have listened. And now Will Valentis was in charge, doing everything short of publicly salivating at the prospect of having his own ship.

She was in the process of detailing the promiscuity of every one of Valentis's ancestors when her door chimed. “Who the fuck is it?” she snapped.

“It's me, Jess. Open the door,” Ted said, just as
Galileo
helpfully displayed
Lieutenant Shimada.

“I can't open it. I'm confined to quarters.”

But Ted had known her a long time. “Fuck that, Lockwood. Let me in.”

“Do you have that little
Demeter
girl with you?”

“What do you take me for?”

She opened the door. Ted stepped inside, and she regretted making him wait. His face was drawn and anguished; she thought he had been crying. Immediately she softened her body language. “Aw, Ted. Maybe you
should
go find your girlfriend.”

“After what she was saying about the captain?” He began pacing back and forth in front of her.

“Valentis is captain now.”

“Fuck that, too,” he said. “No way Central is going to let him keep this ship.” He stopped and stared down at her, furious. “I think he's lying. Don't you think he's lying, Jess? He's always wanted this ship.”

“Come on, Ted.” Strangely, his paranoia was deflating her. “You can't lie about a guy being dead. It comes out if you do that.”

“Well, then, it's bullshit about PSI,” he declared. “That shit doesn't make any sense anyway. It didn't make any sense when Enkha said it, and it doesn't make any more sense from Valentis. He just wants to fucking
shoot
at somebody.”

“
I
want to fucking shoot at somebody,” she told him.

He glared at her, speechless, then dropped into the chair across from her, his rage vanishing. “Elena is going to dissolve,” he said.

Jessica closed her eyes. “We're all going to dissolve, Teddy. What's this ship without that man? I mean, sure, he was an arrogant, single-minded son of a bitch sometimes, but he was ours, you know? And usually he did the right thing.”

“Seemed that way to me,” he agreed; then she heard him shift in his chair. “Jess . . . were you guys sleeping together?”

Jessica opened her eyes. “Valentis is telling everyone that, isn't he?”

“Well, sleep specifically was not mentioned, but yeah.”

She considered detailing all of the reasons why it would be impossible, but settled on, “It's bullshit.”

“I thought so,” he said, but looked relieved.

She was curious. “Why?”

“Because he doesn't do that,” Ted said simply, relating a universal truth.

She thought of that lost, hollow look in Greg Foster's eyes, and felt her throat tighten. “He should have said something to her,” she said, half to herself. “Don't you think?”

“He was better off keeping his mouth shut. He was going after her, though, wasn't he?”

Jessica nodded. And then she sat up straight. “Not just him, either.” She jumped to her feet. “
Galileo,
show Ted the telemetry data on that Fender.”

Ted blinked as the schematic appeared before his eyes. “You want to explain how you did that when you're in lockdown?”

“No, I don't. Ted, can you make anything of that?”

He looked again, this time with a more critical eye. “What am I looking at?”

“You tell me.”

He shot her a look. “Looks a lot like a Fender class cruiser getting swallowed by a whale.”

“That,” she told him, “is our missing Volhynian chief of police.”

“You have lost me.”

She told him of Stoya's background, and of Treiko Zajec's history. Much to her frustration, though, he kept shaking his head. “This is all fascinating, Jess, but it doesn't mean anything. It's a bunch of gossip and old crimes. What does this have to do with the captain? Or even Danny, for that matter? You're looking for connections that aren't there.”

Jessica clenched her fists in frustration. “The connections are somewhere, Ted. I know it. Otherwise none of it makes sense. The captain gave me some grave speech about how we don't know PSI, they've avoided us, they have their own agenda, that sort of bullshit; but I think he was just trying to be cautious. Seriously, Ted, it's been more than eighty years since we shot at each other, and even then, depending on who tells the story, it was either a diplomatic incident or a couple of stupid kids not wanting to admit they were wrong.” A thought occurred to her. “
Galileo,
show me Captain Foster's mail.”

A list of names sprang up before her eyes: hundreds of messages, all from the last twelve hours. She didn't bother scanning them. “Weed out the dross,” she said.

Ted moved to stand next to her. “You are hacking the captain's mail,” he observed.

“Since he's dead,” she corrected, “I'm hacking official Corps documentation.”

“You are going to get court-martialed.”

“That's a distinct possibility,” she agreed. “But in this case, I have permission. The captain told me to check out those anonymous messages.” The filter had left fewer than eighty messages, most of them back and forth with the Admiralty. The most recent one had been sent shortly before he announced Danny's death.

Request permission to access all of Commander Valentis's records on his investigation for Shadow Ops, due to the proximity of the deceased officer to the suspect
Demeter
crew and the potential involvement of PSI with the killing. We all know the local officials do not have all the facts. Commander Valentis's investigation has had a direct and deadly impact on my ship and my crew. Prompt and just resolution is required if we are to continue to operate at peak efficiency.

Their reply had been prompt, terse, and negative.

“What fucking investigation?” Ted asked.

Taking Ted's expletive as a request,
Galileo
brought up the six reports Valentis had sent since they had last left Earth. Jessica had been over them more than once, and had long since stopped feeling outrage. Ted was properly shocked by it all.

“He's been reporting on us,” he said.

“He has,” she confirmed.

“You knew this.”

She nodded. “The captain pulled me into it five months ago, when it started, although at first it was just decoding the redacted parts and validating where they went. Later he had me dogging Valentis's footsteps. There's nothing to these reports, Ted. They're busywork. Distractions for the captain. Maybe even for Valentis. They're a cover for something else.”

“How can you be sure?”

“He gave the captain these reports,” she pointed out, “but there's nothing else. No log entries, no meetings, nothing. What does that tell you?”

“Shadow Ops is nothing but a bunch of bureaucrats playing spy games.” Ted scoffed. “When was the last time anything significant came out of there? Hell, Ellis
left
the Corps so he could get out from under them and start his own company.”

Jessica thought of the founder of the terraforming company, and how quickly he had managed to push his prototypes into the mainstream market. “Or maybe he didn't,” she suggested. “Maybe Shadow Ops likes looking impotent. Get themselves a couple of corporate guys as beards, anything real they do looks like independent economic bullshit. And who in this mess we're in is the biggest enemy of independent economic bullshit?”

Ted frowned. “I don't like your imagination, Jess.”

“Me neither. Will you hate my guts if I read his personal logs?”

“Not if you let me listen in.”

Foster had not been a frequent diarist. His most recent entry was a week old, and it was short. Jessica played the audio.

“Personal log, 3215.23 . . . 24 . . . what the fuck is the date?
Galileo,
time stamp this thing for me when I'm done. Had another message today. ‘Why didn't anyone look for the flight recorder?' Just like the others, it sounds like bullshit, except when I look closer it makes me wonder. And it means that whoever is sending these knows the
Phoenix
took her flight recorder down with her. Someone playing with my head again. I'd suspect Will, but he knows me well enough to recognize that I can go insane without additional help.”

There was a pause; the sound of ice against glass, the sound of Foster swallowing. “It's bullshit, and I should stop listening. I wouldn't be listening at all if we weren't going to be there. I never should have approved Will's request to divert for
Demeter,
but maybe he'll forget what a prick I've been lately. I'll visit the site. I should have before. Whatever else she was, she was my mother. She was Corps. I owe her. Elena will fly me. She may be angry with me . . . but she knows I have to go, and I can't go alone. Maybe, on the way, we can ease up on each other a little.” More ice clinking. “Fuck. I don't know why I do these things. They don't fucking help.”

The recording ended. Jessica wished she had pulled up a transcript instead.

“Wait,” Ted said, oblivious to her reaction. “They don't have the
Phoenix
's flight recorder?”

“No,” Jessica said. “Foster told me earlier.” She didn't want to talk about the
Phoenix.
All she could see in her mind was her captain, elbows on his desk, no company but his diary and far too much scotch. That was how the man had chosen to live. She could not agree with Ted. Foster should have grown a spine and told Elena his feelings years ago. This was bullshit, and now he was dead, and it was pissing her off.

But Ted was clearly bothered by something else. “Nobody ever said that,” he told her. He stood, and started pacing, agitated. “When she went down—I was ten. I remember where I was when I heard. My dad was making toast for breakfast, and I was doing some preteen bullshit thing about how my old man had no imagination, and my mom came in and played the announcement off the stream. Four hundred and fifty-six people. They told us it was engine failure. They
said
that, Jess, I remember.”

“I remember, too, Ted.” She had still been on Tengri. Corps starships and their exploits had been the stuff of science fiction to her, but she had sensed the deep sadness among the adults.

He would not let it go. “Why doesn't this bother you more?”

“It does bother me. I just—I'm pissed off, Ted, and maybe I don't have the capacity to be pissed off about everything right now.”

“What other messages did he get?”

She had been planning to look at them. She had been thinking about crypto hacks to try, how to break the code in small pieces, to acquire bits of data if she could not translate the large ones, but she'd had no time to try anything. “Pull up the anonymous messages,” she said.

All of Foster's messages disappeared but four. The first had been sent twelve days earlier, just before they had docked at Aleph Nine, and it read like a cheap fortune teller's prediction:

Incomplete information is worse than no information at all.

He had opened it once, and had marked it for deletion without actually throwing it away. The second message, which he had quoted in his log entry, had arrived just a week ago. The third message was stamped yesterday:

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

Ted read it, and frowned.

“Is this suggesting the radiation is due to more than the
Phoenix
?” he asked.