The Cold Between (7 page)

Will exploded. “I've told you! I—” He looked away, then got to his feet, agitated, running his fingers through his short black hair. He was graying here and there; Greg had not noticed before. “Lancaster spoke a lot with the
Demeter
crew, yes.” He began to pace. “You know what he was like; he wanted everyone to get along, and most of our crew hasn't exactly welcomed them with open arms.”

Greg thought that went both ways, but he let it pass. “Would they have discussed anything proprietary with him?”

Will had stopped at Greg's window and was looking down at the planet. “They shouldn't know anything proprietary,” he said at last.

That had cost him, and Greg tried to remind himself to appreciate that. “But if they did,” he pressed, “would they have told Lancaster?”

“I won't speculate.” Will's expression had closed, and Greg thought that small admission was the only thing he was going to get.

Greg allowed himself to rub his eyes; there was no point in posturing anymore. Will had told him all he needed to know about how deeply
Demeter
was involved in all of this. Any further investigation was going to have to be his own. The problem was how to ensure he could investigate unencumbered. He did not want to make an enemy out of Will, not in the middle of a crisis. It had crossed his mind, however, that they might be beyond that point.

“Here's what's going to happen, Commander.” He spoke calmly, wanting Will to understand that his decision was not made in a temper. “We're going to stay here as long as it takes to get Lancaster's death resolved. That means more than just Novanadyr charging his killer; it means we find out
why
he did it.”

“Central won't allow that.”

“You let me worry about Central.” There were delaying tactics he could use, everything from semantic arguments to outright lies. If he achieved his ends, he thought the Admiralty would forgive him, or at least not come down on him too hard. “But in the meantime . . . I'm shutting you down, Commander. Your investigation stops right now. S-O gets nothing until we find out what happened to Lancaster.”

“You can't do that, Captain!” Will turned on Greg, shouting into his face. “They are not just my superior officers. They are yours as well, and this will
not
be tolerated!”

Greg held on to his temper. “Maybe not,” he said evenly, “but that's on me, Will. I'm revoking your external comm privileges, effective immediately.”

And to his astonishment, Will laughed. “They'll bust you for this,” he said, with certainty.

“Maybe.” Greg wondered exactly who Will's allies were. “But if they do, it'll be after we get answers for Danny Lancaster.”

J
essica sat before a cup of bitter coffee, surrounded by her silent and somber friends. After the captain's speech, about half of them had stayed in the pub: more than a hundred people, including the
Demeter
crew members. They might be self-satisfied jackasses, but their distress seemed genuine. Danny had spent a lot of time talking to them, even Lieutenant Commander Limonov, widely known to be half-mad. Danny had listened to the man's ravings, all his tin-foil-hat theories of aliens and government conspiracies, with what had always seemed to be genuine interest. Now Limonov sat with his crewmates, scowling miserably into a clear glass of dark liquid, and Jessica reflected that everyone needed someone to listen once in a while.

“Excuse me.”

Along with the rest of the table, Jessica looked up. Captain Foster stood over them, his demeanor grave and military, unrecognizable from the hollow-eyed, resigned man she had left in the hangar.

Damn, he's a good actor.

“I'm sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I need to borrow Lieutenant Lockwood for a moment.”

The others murmured excuses and one by one removed themselves from the table. Jessica wondered at that; surely she and the captain should have been the ones to leave. But it was deference to him, she realized: no matter how big a jerk he was to Elena, no matter what sorts of rumors persisted in the hallways, Captain Foster's crew adored him. She adored him a little herself, which irritated her sometimes; she did not like to think she was subject to military psychology. But she had to admit, no matter how well she got to know him, no matter what stupid mistakes she saw him make, she would always be willing to walk into death for him.

He waited for the others to leave, then dropped into a chair next to her. He was a good-looking fellow, her captain. A bit on the thin side, sure; but he had a handsome, chiseled face just this side of perfection, well-muscled arms, and lovely, long-fingered hands that gestured gracefully when he was speaking. And his eyes, of course. Those eyes, light gray and black, strange zebra-stripe eyes, laser-bright against his dark skin. She had thought, when she met him, that they were a cosmetic affectation. It had not taken her long before she realized affectations were alien to him. He dealt purely in somber reality, although she caught flashes, sometimes, of lightheartedness. As she looked at him now, he seemed weary and defeated, and she wondered how much was Danny, and how much was Elena.

Jessica did not understand it at all. For months Elena had seemed to recognize, on some level, that Foster needed to keep away from her, and had tried to give him space; and then
everything had blown up a few weeks ago in the pub. Jessica did not believe he had really meant the things he had said, but she knew how Elena held a grudge. He was going to be a long time rebuilding that bridge, if he could do it at all, and she did not think having to break the news of Danny's death had eased any tension.

“Did Commander Valentis say anything useful?” she asked him.

She had seen the look on his face when he had left with Valentis. Five months ago Foster had handed her the first of Commander Valentis's reports to Shadow Ops, with a carefully worded request for her to see what she could make of the parts that had been redacted. Without explicit authorization to decrypt, she had simply documented the algorithms, and how long it might take a competent hacker to break them.

When he had shown up with the next report, she had asked why he was confiding in her, and not Commander Broadmoor, his security head. “Because you're more loyal to me than to the rules,” he had told her.

She had never been sure what to make of that, but she couldn't disagree.

He unfolded his long legs under the table and crossed them at the ankles. “Not so you'd notice,” he replied. “Double-talk about Lancaster and the
Demeter
crew, and how it's all just a coincidence it happened on this cargo drop.”

“You believe him?”

To her surprise, he paused. “I don't know,” he said at last.

On top of everything else, she found herself hit with a wave of unease. “You think his story is credible.”

“I think,” Foster said slowly, “that ‘credible' and ‘true' are
not the same thing.” He looked over at her, and she saw a familiar sharpness in his eyes. “How comfortable would you be digging into the life of a dead man?”

The breach of privacy should have horrified her, but it was action, and it might actually prove useful. “Parameters, sir?” she asked.

“No parameters, Lieutenant. I want everything.”

“What if I run into something locked?”

“We'll clear it after the fact.”

She held his gaze for a moment. “Locked” could mean tagged as private, or it could mean classified and sealed under threat of court-martial. She wondered briefly if her captain was testing her. Greg Foster got creative with regulations sometimes—she had heard him interpret orders with impressive semantic gymnastics—but there were lines he just didn't cross. It occurred to her to ask him if he understood what he was suggesting. She had learned over the years, though, that he missed almost nothing. He knew exactly what he was asking her to do, and how good she would have to be to do it.

This was more than circumventing regulations. This was working around the Admiralty, around Shadow Ops, around Central Gov itself. Regardless of her intentions, she could be charged with treason. There was something bigger happening, something he had not told her yet—and he didn't trust his own command chain to handle it. That he trusted her was both flattering and daunting, and she had no intention of letting him down.

“She spent the night with someone, didn't she?”

It took her a moment to recognize the change of subject, and
she grew immediately wary. Like every practical, pragmatic man, he had a blind spot, and his had been the same as long as she had known him. “Why do you ask?”

She knew he had heard her bristle. He always heard it when she bristled. “This guy—do you think they're at a point where she'd lean on him? No matter what she thinks she needs, at some point being alone is not going to work.”

Oh, hell, he thought it was someone on board. “It wasn't one of ours, sir,” she told him. “He was a stranger. Some guy she met at the bar.”

“That doesn't sound like her.”

“You think I'm making it up?”

“Of course not. I just—you know her as well as I do. You're telling me you're not surprised?”

She thought back. She had been pleasantly tipsy when Elena had left the group, but she remembered the pirate, how he had leaned toward her friend and smiled, how Elena had laughed, her whole body relaxing for the first time all night. “Not with this guy,” she told him. “He was tall, dark, and handsome, and looked like he'd had his nose broken a half-dozen times and didn't care about getting it fixed. He even wore the uniform, which seemed a little weird at a local pub, but it looked good on him.”

“Uniform? You said he wasn't one of ours.”

Oops.
“No, sir. He was PSI.”

Foster became utterly still, and for one disconcerting moment she could not read his expression at all. “Are you certain of that, Lieutenant?”

All of her alarm bells were going off. “Certain? No. He was wearing all black, and he had his hair pulled back in a braid,
like they do. Of course, he was friendly, at least with her, so maybe he was just playing the part.” Jessica thought of her friend—tall, dark, and lovely—and did not wonder that anyone, even a PSI soldier, would warm to her. “What is it about PSI, sir?”

“We don't know anything about them,” he tried. “We don't know why this man was there. None of our intelligence suggests they do shore leave like we do. What could he want on Volhynia, then?”

She took in the anxiety on his face. She was beginning to think this wasn't about jealousy after all. “Don't bullshit me, sir. I know you. You don't get paranoid about PSI. Hell, you're not shy about working with them when we need them.”

“That's in the Fourth Sector. I don't know them here.”

“But they're on our side, sir. Aren't they?”

He was silent for a long time, and her spine began to tingle again. PSI was an acronym pulled from a dead language, which roughly translated meant
freedom, truth, intellect.
In her experience, they lived up to the sentiment. Like many people who had grown up on a world with limited resources, she viewed PSI as a positive force, sometimes heroic. PSI supply drops had kept her warm and properly fed as a child. It had never occurred to her before that she knew nothing of them at all.

“It's more than just Danny,” she said quietly, “isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“And you can't tell me.”

“No.”

She took a moment to silently curse rank and regulations, then nodded. “I'll get on Danny's records, sir,” she said formally. There was little she could do for Danny, but she could do this.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. And as soon as I can—” He was interrupted by a chime from his comm. “Yes?”

Jessica heard nothing; he had it set to private audio, the patch behind his ear flashing dimly as he listened, but by his lack of response she knew the message was not from a person, but from
Galileo
herself. She saw the color drain from his face, and his eyes grew hard and determined. Before he was finished listening, he was on his feet. She stood as well, and wished she hadn't; the difference in their heights seemed less dramatic when she was sitting down. “Sir?” she asked.

“They've released the killer's name,” he told her tersely. “I need to talk to the chief.”

E
lena sat on the floor between her bed and the window, staring out at the stars. She could so easily imagine being out there in the icy darkness, weightless, airless, soundless. Sometimes as she watched she held her breath; but she could still hear her heartbeat, and under that the soft, constant thrum of
Galileo
's systems. The ship made a different sound when they were in the FTL field at speed, but even at rest it sang, gentle as a lullaby. That song always made Elena think of Jake, and for a long time it had left her sad; but in recent months, despite her battles with Greg, it had made her feel strong, and less alone. Even after she broke up with Danny. Especially after.

She tried to feel grief, but all of her rage, all of the intensity that should have been about Danny was focused on Greg. Why had he brought them here? He hated tourist planets. She had wondered about his mother, about being close to the wormhole and the site of the
Phoenix
accident; but the man she knew wouldn't have kept tired troops out another three solid weeks just to get three billion kilometers away from where a starship had been blown to pieces twenty-five years ago. There was something else happening; she had seen it in him. Only there
was no way for her to ask him, this man who had become a stranger to her, what was really going on.

The anger was childish and pointless. She was stupid. And more than anything, she wished for the Greg she had known six months ago, who would have sat here, as he had after Jake died, asking nothing of her, just staring with her out at the stars.

She climbed to her feet, turning her back to the window. “
Galileo,
have you got a Novanadyr news feed?”

“Twelve feeds are available, six on the stream.”

That surprised her; stream feeds usually meant tabloid journalism, and Volhynia didn't seem like the kind of place that would encourage such a thing. “Find me one with a decent news reputation.”

“Standard or local dialect?”

The local language, like Standard and most of those spoken in the Fourth and Fifth Sectors, was a derivative of ancient Russian. Elena knew enough to get by, but she did not want to risk losing the subtleties. “Standard,” she said.

The vid flared to life in the air half a meter before her eyes. She saw a low building made of yellow sanded brick lit by the planet's unfamiliar, anemic sunshine, an overlay identifying it as the police station. For a moment she thought the picture was static, but occasionally the small shrubs planted by the foundation stirred in the wind, and eventually a bland, accentless voice-over explained that they were waiting for a promised update from Yigor Stoya, the chief of police.

“Is this all they're showing?” she asked, after several minutes without change.

“A summary of earlier updates to this story is available,”
Galileo
told her.

Elena dropped into one of the chairs that sat at her little table by the door. “Let's have that, then.”

A selection of news clips began playing: the initial report of the murder, identifying him only as a tourist; some reaction shots from a selection of local merchants; a brief statement from a sturdy, barrel-chested man in his early forties identified as Chief Stoya. He had iron-gray hair over weary eyes set in pale skin, and she was almost certain he was an off-worlder. There was something in how he moved that set him apart from the natives she had seen, something familiar that she could not place. The set of his mouth gave him a look of ruthlessness, and she wondered if that ruthlessness applied to his pursuit of justice.

She opted to watch the full vid of the arrest of the suspect. Oddly, he had been at the station at the time, reporting finding the body.
What a strange way of trying to divert suspicion,
she thought; and then she watched as the police hustled the man, in old-fashioned handcuffs, through the low yellow building's open front entrance.

And her blood went cold.

His hair was loose, hanging over his face; but she could see one bruised, half-shut eye, and his lip was split in several places. Blood had dripped onto his clothes: white and pristine that morning, she remembered. His knuckles were clean; he had not fought back. She supposed, knowing something of the local laws, that would have been close to suicide. He glowered at the cameras, his dark eyes irate, but she caught a resignation in them as well. A man like him, PSI for most of his life, would not be surprised to find himself railroaded by colony law.

He was marched forward far enough for the news crews to get a good look at him, and then he was bundled around to the
back of the building and out of sight. The shot switched, this time to a different police officer, identified as Lieutenant Commander Janek Luvidovich, investigator in charge. He spoke with intelligence and deliberation, diverting the press with articulate non-answers . . . and had it not been for the edges of a hangover tugging at the corners of his eyes, she might not have recognized him as the incoherent man who had grabbed her arm the night before.

She swore, leaping to her feet. “
Galileo,
how old is that clip?”

“Two hours sixteen minutes.”

Two hours.
God.
They would have been beating him again, almost certainly. They would want a confession, and he had nothing to confess. “Is there an ident on the suspect?”

Galileo
flashed a name, and she froze. “Truly?” she said faintly.

“Suspect has confirmed to police.”

She swept her hand through the video and hurried out of her room, heading back in the direction of the pub. “Where's the captain?”

“Captain Foster is in the atrium.”

She emerged from the narrow corridor that housed her quarters into the bright, wide atrium area, the center of the ship. Six levels high and fifty meters wide, the space was lit with full-spectrum mid-morning light, making the day on Volhynia look like a winter afternoon. With its gardens full of vegetable plants and fruit orchards, the atrium had always provided her with enough of a sense of open space to keep her happy; in the center of it, she could deceive herself that it was a park on a colony somewhere, and not the central hub of a starship.

Elena scanned the paths before her, oblivious to the beauty she passed. She did not have to search long. He was walking toward her, his stride businesslike, and she had the impression that he had been coming to find her.

“Captain,” she said as they approached each other, “I need to talk to you.”

“I need to talk to you, too, Chief.”

He stopped, glaring at her, and she felt a flash of exasperation. So much for their recent argument diffusing his pent-up anger. He was annoyed with her again, for God only knew what, and she did not have time to tiptoe around his temper. “Captain, I've got to go back down.”

“The hell you do.” She could not tell if he was more incredulous or annoyed.

Why does he never just listen?
Ignoring his outburst, she said, “I need a shuttle, and I need to get down there right now, because they've been beating him up already, sir, and it's only going to get worse.”

“You are not going
anywhere
until you tell me about this PSI officer you spent the night with!”

There were not a lot of people in the atrium: half a dozen that she could see, huddled in groups, hanging on to each other as they processed the shock of Danny's death. Greg's outburst had secured the attention of all of them.

She didn't care. “I'm
trying
to tell you, sir. They've got the wrong man, and that investigator isn't going to let him go, and I have to get down there and untangle it or they're not going to do a goddamned thing to find Danny's killer.”

“They've got his killer. And I want you to tell me what the hell PSI is doing dropping people on Volhynia.”

She replayed that in her head, and could not make it comprehensible. “What are you talking about?”

“That man you were with last night? I want to know who he was, and what he was doing there, and how in the hell Treiko Tsvetomir Zajec ended up on Volhynia
murdering
my crewman.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you!” She wanted to shake him. “He didn't, Greg. He couldn't have. He was with me when Danny died, and for hours afterward. What the
hell
are you talking about?”

Slowly his eyes widened, some of his anger and frustration dissipating. “You're telling me the suspect—Captain Zajec—
that's
the PSI officer you spent the night with?”

“What did you think?” she asked irritably. “That there were hordes of them down there, and one of them diverted me while the others hunted down Danny?”

He was staring at her, but she knew the look. That was exactly what he had been thinking. “Come sit down,” he said at last, and took a step toward a bench next to the herb garden.

Now
you want to keep this private?
“We do not have time.” But she followed him, and she saw the others turn away, losing interest in the argument.

When she sat, he turned toward her. “Tell me.”

“That man they've arrested. Treiko Zajec. He's the man I was with last night. And unless they completely bollixed up the time of death, he could not have murdered Danny.”

“You're sure of this.”

“Yes.”

“He didn't step out, comm someone else? What about while you were sleeping?”

“We didn't sleep.” He looked away, and she felt like shaking him again. “Greg, the ident. Are we really sure it's him?”

“He's the right age,” he said, “and he's apparently known to the local PD.” He rubbed his eyes, and for a moment she glimpsed his extreme fatigue. She wondered if he had commed Danny's sister yet. “Elena, what the hell is a PSI captain doing in a place like Novanadyr?”

The Fifth Sector was not their usual patrol.
Galileo
took the Fourth Sector, and was familiar with the PSI ships that shared their territory. Greg had met all of the officers, had even befriended a few of them; Elena knew most of their names. But even outside of the Fifth Sector, everyone in the Corps knew the names of its PSI captains: Piotr Adnovski, Valeria Solomonoff, Aleksandra Venkaya, and Treiko Zajec.

The dark-eyed chef. Her lover.

“He's retired,” she told Greg. “He said about six months.”

“Why Volhynia?”

“He was born there.”

“Why'd he leave?”

She thought of the sister who did not want to acknowledge him. “He didn't say. Greg, why does it matter?” She shifted, wanting to run to the hangar and get moving. “He didn't kill Danny, and I need to make a statement, or they'll hang it around his neck.”

“I've talked to the cops,” he said. “Stoya, and that kid they've got in charge of it. They're not stupid. You really think they're just going to hang it on an innocent man?”

“That kid they've got in charge of it is part of the problem,” she said.

His face grew wary. “Why?”

She told him.

“Oh, that's fucking
marvelous,
” he snapped. “The chief fucking investigator, knocked on his ass by the most notorious pirate in the sector, over
you.
”

“So you see why I need to make a statement.”

He shook his head. “Elena, you can't go back there. What do you think they're going to say when they find out you and Danny were lovers? You really think that's going to help the guy?”

“What are they going to do, call me a liar? With Central backing me up?” He just looked at her, and after a moment her stomach dropped. “Oh,” she said.

“You go down there, you're just going to make it worse.”

“You're telling me Central doesn't care who killed Danny?”

“It's not about that.”

His expression had closed again, and she clenched her teeth.
God, this secrecy is bullshit.
“Greg,” she asked him, “what's going on?”

“You know the political situation with Volhynia.”

Everyone
knew the political situation here. Volhynia: the planet that didn't require terraformers, had a healthy, growing population, was a tourist center, and a scientific hub. Central needed people to believe that Volhynia was not the exception: that humanity was able to thrive out here, that they weren't fighting a losing battle against score after score of hostile environments.

But she could not believe Central would let the murder of one of their own go unpunished. “I don't believe it,” she said flatly. “It's something else, Greg, something that you're trying not to tell me.”
I'm going back with or without your permission,
she told him silently,
so give me something to work with here.

He was staring at her intently, eyes serious, evaluating her. He frightened some people when he was like this, but she knew better. He was trying to understand, trying to read her mind, trying to figure out how much he really needed to say. Before, he would not have hesitated; he would have known he could trust her. In all fairness, before, she would have trusted his advice without needing to know why he gave it, too.

Now, she needed to know. After a moment he looked away. “This is command-level intel, Elena,” he said.

“Who the hell am I going to tell?”

He shot her a look. “MacBride is reporting that
Demeter
was hit by PSI.”

She thought for a moment he was joking. “Bullshit,” she said.

“He is reporting,” he told her, “that they approached the PSI ship
Penumbra
outside the
Phoenix
hot zone, and when they asked what the ship was doing there, they were fired upon.”

“Penumbra.”
She had a vague memory of having heard the name. “That wasn't Captain Zajec's ship.”

Greg shook his head. “Solomonoff's.”

“She doesn't have the reputation for being crazy.”