The Cold Between (17 page)

Volhynia

T
he night air was cooler, and Elena shivered. Trey tugged her closer as they walked, and slipped an arm around her waist again; gratefully she reached around to share his warmth. It was courtesy, certainly, like his gentleness with her earlier; but she had no time for pride. She had come back to free him, and she would do it, and then she would shake his hand and say farewell to him.

But she did not know what she would have to go back to.

Her mind was spinning with possibilities and doubts, and she was not capable of sorting any of it out anymore. She found it easier to sit with the idea of Central lying to her, of her work all of these years having been a deception. Every time she thought of Greg, of her seven years of service with him—of her belief, even as their friendship dissolved, that he was a decent and noble man—her mind danced away, toward Danny, toward Trey, toward the evening stars.

You know nothing,
she reminded herself.
One question at a time.

Trey stopped at a busy street corner before an older building. Like his flat, it sported print locks and high windows; but
the stairs were steeper, and the entryway was narrower. They climbed, and as they reached the top, he hit the door chime. “Ilya, it is me. I have brought someone to meet you.”

After a moment the lock disengaged, and Trey pushed open the door.

The interior was done in old-fashioned blues and browns, but it was clean and well lit, and unlike Trey's building included an elevator at the back of the hallway. But it was the door of the first-floor flat that opened, revealing a small, slight man of indeterminate age. He had a full head of white hair, and a face so wrinkled it was difficult to read his expression; but his eyes were bright and clear, and he smiled when he saw them.

“This is not your usual time, Treiko Zajec,” he said, but he was looking at Elena.

“I am sorry to bother you, my friend,” Trey said. “I am wondering if you would have a few minutes to talk to us.”

“Of course,” he told them. “Come in.” He stood aside.

The entire flat consisted of one room, with a door to a bathroom in one corner, but it was packed with furniture. A long sofa and an overstuffed chair stood against one wall, and the rest of the space, apart from the small kitchen, was covered in vintage floor lamps. The lampshades were in bright, varied colors; she did not think any two were designed to work together, but the overall effect was one of good cheer and artistry. He had artwork on the walls as well, in the same scattering of styles. She recognized one artist that Jessica collected.

“Elena,” Trey said formally, “this is my friend Ilya Putin. Ilya, this is Commander Elena Shaw, of the Central starship
Galileo.
”

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Elena said, and took his offered hand.

“And you, Commander.” His smile widened. “May I offer you something? I have some wine, or some very nice bourbon.”

Elena smiled back. “Thank you, no, not for me.”

Trey cleared his throat. “I do not mean to be ungracious, but we may be against something of a deadline,” Trey said. “Did you hear about the young man who was found dead this morning?”

The gleam vanished from Ilya's eye. “I have been watching the news. I am sorry, Commander Shaw, that you have lost a comrade. Such tragedies are senseless.”

“The thing is,” she said, “you may have spoken with him last night, before he was killed. Do you remember, at Gregorian's, talking with a soldier?”

Before she finished the question, his face lit with recognition, and then sadness. “That boy was the one who died?” He shook his head. “He seemed like such an innocent.”

She turned the word over in her head. Despite Danny's lies, it was not entirely inaccurate.

“Do you remember what you discussed with him?” Trey asked.

Ilya looked mildly annoyed. “I am not so old, you know,” he replied, and she caught herself smiling at Trey's chastened look. “You have time to sit down, at least.”

They took the couch, and Trey reached out and took her hand in his without looking. “He seemed curious, mostly, about the surge,” Ilya said.

“Surge?” Elena asked.

He raised his bushy eyebrows. “I suppose this would not have been news where you were at the time. Either of you,” he added,
nodding at Trey. “About six months ago, our pulsar had a surge. We were washed for three days straight. Eighty percent of the uncaged electricals in the city were damaged or destroyed. Riga was without power entirely. There were riots.”

“That could not have been long before I returned,” Trey said. “Why does no one speak of it?”

“You know the answer to that, Treiko Zajec. People have habits, and when they are able to indulge them, disruptions are forgotten. The researchers, though, are trying to see if they can predict when it might happen again. It may be a thousand years. It may never happen. But they are nervous. I find I think only that it is good no one died, and it might be time to update our grid, despite how pretty the wireless transfer stations look.”

“Is that why Volhynia is powered this way?” she asked. “Artistry?”

“At the start it was necessity. They did not have enough hardware to cage all of their equipment, so they created the model we are still using today. It is kept, they say, because it brings tourists, but I think it is simply laziness and fear of change. They worry our cities will lose their charm if we do not expose ourselves to this natural phenomenon. Not to mention the expense. Ellis is the only big manufacturer, and the power equipment subsidizes their terraformer business. There is actually some public debate on the topic,” he said, looking at Trey. “I am surprised you have heard nothing.”

“I have heard some,” Trey said. “Mostly Katya complaining about the changes she would have to make to the restaurant. Is this what you spoke to the boy about, Ilya?”

Ilya shook his head. “We did not get to local politics. He began by buying me a drink, and then asking me about my
career. He spoke to all of us like that. Most felt he was just a gregarious tourist. But I thought . . .” He trailed off, glancing briefly at Elena. “He was . . . polished. He wanted something from me, and when he listened he seemed to see that as payment. As if I owed him a confidence, because he had shown me kindness. I apologize, Commander,” he added, and his face reflected real regret. “I see these things in people. I am sometimes wrong.”

She shook her head. “I think you put it very well,” she told him. Surprisingly, all she felt was sadness. This stranger had seen in one night what she had not recognized in years.

“What did he ask you?” Trey prompted.

“General things at first,” Ilya answered. “What pulsars do, the effects of electromagnetism. He asked a great deal about radiation, and electromagnetic waves. But when he asked me what sort of audio signals might be carried on such a wave, I knew what he was getting at. He was wondering about the Singing Star.”

Elena's mind capitalized the words. “What is that?” she asked.

“There have been stories, now and again, over the years. Some people think it is a myth, or a result of staring into space for too long,” he related, with some amusement. “But myths often have a grain of truth. I heard it myself, the first night of the pulsar surge,” he confided. “Just for a moment. I wondered if I was imagining, if had stayed up too late, but my head was quite clear.”

“Where is this Singing Star?” Trey asked him.

“From here, it is on the other side of the pulsar,” Ilya told them.

And Elena knew before he said it. “The wormhole,” she said. “You have heard music from the wormhole.”

He nodded. “Your friend Danny said he had spoken to someone else who had heard it, although they were not on Volhynia. He seemed pleased that I confirmed their story. He thanked me, and he moved on, and shortly afterward he spent some time talking to that lovely young woman who seats people there.”

Stars made sounds, she knew. Radiographers could play their waves, and computers could translate almost anything into audible tones.
Galileo
had her own music: the gentle pulse of the engine, irregular but repeating. Different for every ship, thanks to the grown crystals that were a unique part of each machine. Elena fell asleep to that pulse; the lack of it now was making her edgy.

But she did not think that was what Ilya meant.

“How did you hear it?” she asked him.

He understood her immediately, and the genial old man became a sharp-eyed scientist. “It was a comm-level audio wave,” he told her. “It had a melody, and it was repeated.”

“Man-made.”

“Created, almost certainly,” he agreed, “although it would not be unlike the human mind to hear a repeating set of notes and assign some kind of intelligent order to it.”

“Can you remember it?”

“I can do better than that,” he told her, a twinkle in his eye. “I can play it for you.” He stood. “Come upstairs and I will show you.”

Elena glanced at Trey. What she was thinking was madness. This was some bit of debris, some artifact catching an odd sort of energy and scattering sounds through space. It could not
possibly be what she thought it was. After twenty-five years of nothing . . . it would be a remarkable coincidence.

Like everything else that had brought her here.

They stood, and followed Ilya out of the door.

Ilya ignored the elevator and headed for the stairs, climbing steadily. Elena revised her original impression: the slowness of old age was, at least partly, a front. Danny would have seen through it, she realized. He had always been good at reading people, and knowing how to approach them. It had worked with her. That Ilya had seen through Danny's self-serving charm said a lot about the old man's powers of observation.
And not much for mine,
she thought.

Greg had never liked Danny. He had never said anything to her, and, more than that, he had always treated Danny the same as he did the rest of the crew. But whenever Danny's name came up, Greg became guarded—just a little, nothing anyone else would have noticed—but enough to make her change the subject. She wondered, now, why that hadn't bothered her more at the time. She had told Trey she and Greg never spoke of personal things . . . and yet they had, especially before Jake was killed. He knew all about her family, and how often she felt guilty for not missing them, and she knew all about his mother, and the
Phoenix
accident, and the things they had only told the families, and no one else.

Like the fact that they had never found the ship's flight recorder. Like the specific melodic transmission, unique for each Corps starship, that would identify the recorder from the
Phoenix.
The recorder was engineered, upon activation, to emit nothing but that brief repeated radio signal, until a Corps ship with appropriate authorization came close enough. The re
corder would dump its information to the other ship and fall silent, its job completed.

If this was the
Phoenix
flight recorder, apparently no one had come close enough yet.

They climbed four flights of stairs and exited onto the roof. The sky was not completely dark, but as high as they were the city's sidewalk lights produced almost no pollution, and the star field filled the deep navy sky. Elena's eyes swept over it, the familiarity soothing her nerves. Next to her Trey put his arm around her waist again, and she leaned against him. He was becoming familiar as well.

Ilya walked to the edge of the roof, where a table stood, covered in equipment. Beneath the table she saw a crude bank of batteries, sheathed in a simple Faraday cage. He had power, she realized, even when the lights were out, no matter what kind of rules they had at the observatory. She wondered how many of the natives had some kind of setup like this.

With practiced fingers he switched on the audio visualizer and pulled up a waveform.

“Wait,” Elena said. “I want to avoid confirmation bias.” She turned to Trey and hummed a complex sequence of tones. “Can you repeat it?”

He frowned and tried, and she corrected him twice. When she was confident he remembered, she nodded at Ilya. “Go ahead.”

She listened until it played all the way through, just to be certain; but it was the same abstract sequence she had taught to Trey.

Trey was staring at her, his expression grim, but Ilya was delighted. “You know what it is! Can you tell me?”

She met Trey's eyes. “Strictly speaking,” she said faintly, “I am not allowed.”

“It is the flight recorder,” Trey told Ilya, never dropping her eyes, “for the CCSS
Phoenix,
lost twenty-five years ago.” She wasn't surprised he had guessed. “Elena, Central has maintained that the incident was an accident. How can they know this without the flight recorder?”

She had asked Greg the same thing. The explanation he had given her seemed so thin now. “They cannot be certain,” she admitted. “They told Greg it was a solid guess, based on the other information they had: radiation levels, cargo, and the engine on the ship. It was a hybrid; catastrophic failure was always a possibility with the hybrids.”

“And yet it only happened once.”

Why didn't I ever push Greg this hard?
“They say this accident moved them away from hybrids once and for all,” she told him, “but I know how long it takes them to build a ship. They'd phased out the hybrid designs five years before the accident, minimum. The
Phoenix
was the last one running.”

“Perhaps it is just a coincidence,” Ilya put in.

Elena caught a glimmer of amusement in Trey's eyes. “In truth, Ilya Putin, I think the only true coincidence lately is that you, my friend, were talking to a man I have been accused of killing.”

Ilya looked worried, and Elena was reminded of the concern she had heard in Valeria's voice. “You must be careful, Treiko,” he said. “Stoya is a thug.”