The Cold Between (36 page)

Elsewhere

I
don't suppose it is a voice lock.”

Elena looked up at Trey and smiled. “No such luck,” she told him. “And even if it was, I'd be afraid to bash the daylights out of it.”

“Surely it's not a contact explosive.”

She shook her head. “For detonation, it would need a trigger. But I don't know how stable it is. Stuff like polonium has been known to just break apart on impulse. I don't want to give it an excuse.”

Her eyebrows knit together as she studied the interface. There had to be a release somewhere, some kind of handle into the thing's locking mechanism, but damned if she could find it. She slid her fingers gently over the edges of the box, feeling for anything uneven, and cursed the gloves of her radiation suit. “It's not a physical trigger,” she said. “Any chance we can get a thermal scan through all this noise?”

Trey already had his scanner open, but beyond the radiation levels the picture it had of the box was fuzzy and distorted. She pulled his display closer and spun the image of the box. If it was
a thermal trigger she would never find it. “Can you calibrate it enough to detect changes in surface material?” she asked him.

He frowned. “A fingerprint?”

“Of a sort. If these were assembled by machinery made of something different,” she explained, “they might have left trace elements on the surface. Maybe those will lead us to the lock mechanism.”

He made some adjustments, but the image did not change. “Can you get a finer granularity on the radiation readings?” she asked, playing a hunch.

In an instant the image of the box changed from amorphous orange to discrete blotches of color ranging from bright yellow to dull red. In the bottom corner of the facing panel was a small red patch the size of her thumb. She crouched down and examined the box itself; she could still see nothing, but she pulled out her spanner and aimed it at the corner. Carefully she began pushing through the surface material.

“You cannot open it,” Stoya said, from his position against the wall.

“Shut up,” Greg said to him.

Greg had never holstered his gun, and had never taken his eyes from the Volhynian policeman. Elena could guess what he was feeling. She was angry with Stoya herself, and would have taken great pleasure in shoving him to his death; but she simply wanted revenge. For Greg it was more than that. Losing a crew member was more than a personal loss; it was an affront to his professionalism. With Jake he had been angry, but there had been no one to be angry with, and he'd had no outlet but alcohol. It worried her, how easy it would be for him to shove Stoya into the cavern.

Stoya, though, did not know him so well. “You people of the Corps,” he said, with some contempt, “you are so fond of posturing. That boy of yours. Do you know, he thought he would be famous? That he had discovered some great secret that no one else had recognized? What arrogance. It was astonishing to me that no one had killed him already.”

Elena blinked and focused on the task in front of her. “Greg will kill him, Trey,” she said quietly.

“Do you wish me to stop him?”

She looked up. He was studying her face, his expression closed, and she realized then that if she asked him, he would let Stoya die. She remembered how she had felt training her gun on Stoya, how vividly she could imagine pulling the trigger, him dropping to the ground. She wondered if she could kill him here and now, when he was defenseless, and dying.

Yes, she thought she could.

“There's a slim possibility Stoya actually knows something,” she told him. And radiation sickness, as it progressed, would be deeply unpleasant. Her sense of vengeance, it seemed, leaned more toward the cold.

He nodded and stepped away, and she returned to her task.

“Do not goad the boy, Stoya,” Trey said irritably, and she thought his mood was as much of a performance as Greg's was not.

“Don't insult me, old man,” Greg growled. “This son of a bitch killed my officer. He killed his own officer. I don't need another reason to get rid of him.”

“Your reason,” Trey told him, “is that your engineer is trying to concentrate. So if you are going to kill him, kill him and have done with it. We do not have the time for distractions.”

“He will not kill me,” Stoya said. “He is bloodless, this one. No wonder that woman chose you, Zajec. Men of the Corps have no balls at all.”

Elena heard Trey swear. “Very well, Captain Foster,” he said dismissively, “throw him over.”

Oh, for God's sake.
“All of you, shut the fuck up,” she snapped. “Greg, kill him or don't, but stop rising to his bullshit. And Trey, good God, you know better.”

There was a brief silence, and then she heard Trey's footsteps moving closer. She heard Stoya say, “Perhaps the Corps is not without balls after all,” but this time Greg did not answer. She looked up at Trey when he rejoined her.

“Was that sufficient?” he asked.

“Perfect,” she told him. “I didn't know who to root for.” Carefully she wedged her spanner into the small slice she had made and took a breath, leaning back. “Okay,” she said, “let's give this a try.”

She leaned forward and touched the mechanism, and Ellis's logo appeared, large and bright, on the face of the box. After about half a second it spun, shattered theatrically, and disappeared. A moment later, the entire side of the box obligingly vanished. It was a flashy piece of technology, that lock, but ultimately it was just an interface for a physical key. What the box contained was something else entirely.

The crate was filled, top to bottom, with cubes like the ones they had seen by the entrance, each one stamped with four concentric circles. Trey adjusted his scanner again, and Elena studied the results. The shells were made of an inert material the scanner could not decipher, but the cubes were far less radioactive than pure dellinium. Even this close they only gave off 4.2.
Someone in a regular uniform could handle them for several minutes without receiving a lethal dose. Someone in a radiation suit could carry one for hours.

“What is it?” Greg asked.

She described the cubes to him. “If this really is a stable isotope, I'd only need three of them, maybe four, to get us out of here.”

“Can you verify what they are?” Greg asked.

“Not without opening one up.” She looked up and met Trey's eyes.

“Let me do it,” he said, but she shook her head.

“I'm the one with the spanner.”

She pulled out one of the cubes and held it in the palm of her hand. It was almost buoyant, as if it contained something lighter than air. She moved several meters down the walkway, clear of Trey and the others, and held her hand out over the ledge. Her fingers found the seam on the cube, and she pulled her spanner out again, resting its morphing edge against the join.

“Someone record this,” she said, and twisted it open.

The contents were glowing, as bright as her suit light, and the material lost its shape when the cube wall fell off. It shimmered for an instant, veins of light and dark shifting in its amorphous depths; and then she dropped it into the pit, afraid to breathe until the light it emitted was swallowed by the hole.

Greg looked up. “Dellinium-345, sixty-eight percent certainty,” he said.

“Why so low?”

“The radiation blew most of the readings,” he said, “which is exactly why the sensor concluded it was dellinium.”

She turned back to the crate. “I want to take six, just in case,” she said, plucking cubes from the box. She handed three to Trey. It made her hair stand on end, thinking of the power they held.

“What are you going to do with it?” Stoya asked. “You said yourself that without the proper equipment, even the stable isotope is explosive.”

“And what do you know about the proper equipment?” She tucked three cubes into her pockets, then stared at the crate. It was still packed full; there had to be a thousand cubes in there. A thousand terraformers, a thousand years. No more restrictions for FTL fields; no more twelve-hour recharges. It was all here, more power than any one planet would need. More than all of their colonies scattered throughout the galaxy could ever use. No one need ever starve again. Disasters like Canberra would never have happened at all.

She had been deployed less than six months. She had seen three Aleph stations and a resort planet. Canberra was her first residential colony, the first place that had wanted to be nothing more than someone's home. But that home had become toxic, and the Corps had not made it in time. PSI had tried, but they, too, had brought too little too late. When Elena had arrived, she had learned what happened to humans who lost hope. And she had learned how far she would go in the name of fulfilling her mission.

She was not a killer, but she had killed. She had had a good reason. There was always a good reason. More firepower, more advantage. The bigger the stick, the easier it was to keep the peace. She looked over at Stoya, who was still occupied with glowering at Greg. Bad men were never the real threat.

She swore quietly. “We can't leave it,” she said.

Greg looked over at her, but said nothing. She met Trey's eyes, willing him to understand.
I am sorry,
she told him silently.
All I wanted was to get you home.

She watched as he realized what she was saying, as he wrestled with the idea, just for a moment, looking for alternatives. And then, his bright eyes sad, he nodded. “How do we detonate it?” he asked her.

That, of all things, finally unnerved Stoya. “Detonate? Are you mad? This entire planet will go up. There will be radiation for thousands of light years. You could destabilize the wormhole.”

“Thanks for the astrophysics lesson.” Greg sounded calm and secure, and she almost smiled. This was the man she had worked with for the last seven years. “Where do we set it off?”

“In the pit,” she said. She turned and started walking briskly up the ramp, the way they had come.
Sartre
obligingly flashed
Nine minutes
in the air before her eyes; she would have to set it up quickly if they were to have a chance at escape. “We can use the isotope to detonate the raw material. I can cannibalize something in that lab up there for a trigger, maybe even a timer.”

“This is suicide!” Stoya was stalking after them, but his earlier composure had deserted him. “Do you think they have spent decades putting this refinery together so you can blow it up? Do you think they will
thank
you for this?”

“Who is ‘they'?” Greg did not slow down to wait for the answer.

“You know who they are!”

“Shadow Ops.”

Elena looked over at him. “Not Central?”

He would not meet her eyes. “I don't know,” he admitted. “Possibly. But not everyone. I know that much.”

“Stupid, naive woman,” Stoya growled. “Do you think any private corporation would have a setup like this without approval from the government? If you destroy this refinery, you will destroy your career.”

Elena wondered, for a moment, at the sort of person who would think she was concerned with her career in the face of all this. “For all I know,” she said, “it's Ellis running this place and lying to our government about what's involved. Ellis used to work underground, so who's to say he hasn't got some rogue friends still involved?”

“That might fly,” Greg agreed, and she grinned.

“Let's get out of here alive,” she suggested, “and then we can worry about how much to leave out.”

Trey was shaking his head. “I do wonder how easily you Corps soldiers lie to one another.”

Stoya was not finished, however. “You speak of my crimes, my deeds that you would call evil. What is it you call this? You know what this material could do. You know the lives it could save. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. And you would destroy it because you mistrust your government?”

For a moment she thought of ignoring the question, but she wanted to say it aloud, for Trey and Greg to hear it. They would all be responsible, after all. “Actually,” she said, “I don't mistrust my government. Not in any major way, anyway. I trust they'd take this dellinium isotope and use it to build some truly amazing, life-saving things. They might even manage six months before they decided to use it as a ‘deterrent' for some
Second Sector turf war. Maybe a whole year would pass before some psychopath like yourself got ahold of enough to make a threat.” She glanced at Greg; he met her eyes, his long stride never slowing, and she turned back to Stoya. “You may believe I'm killing people,” she finished. “From where I stand? I'm saving them.”

Stoya was gaping. “I will not be a part of this!”

“Fine,” Elena said, as they emerged from the hallway into the main hangar. “Then stay out of the way.”

In the end she had to dismantle the robotic arm to build a timer. Detonation was not an issue; one comm circuit triggered to overheat would set off the isotope once it was out of its protective casing. She had finished the explosive in a few minutes, and could have burned Ellis's project to vapor in an instant, but she took an extra moment for the timer. She found, even in the face of preventing the kind of war that had taken the civilization of this planet, that she had never felt more strongly about staying alive.

She hurried back into the hangar, where the light was better. Greg and Trey had opened an access panel in one wall and were pulling out lengths of wire. She had no idea how much they would need to lower the isotope to the bottom of the mine, but six hundred meters would put it close enough to the unrefined ore to set off the chain reaction.

Stoya was sitting on the floor close to the two men. Odd circles had formed under his eyes. He looked utterly dispirited, and she thought if she were a better person she might have felt sorry for him.