The Cold Between (29 page)

“Wait,” she said, and opened the last one.

You don't believe that boy was killed over curiosity, do you?

Ted started pacing again. Jessica pulled up the message's ident. She could tell by skimming it had been counterfeited; it was clean for validation, but the auth code was gibberish. Well-formatted gibberish, though, designed to pass seamlessly through all of Central's top-level checks. “Someone has friends in high places,” she mumbled, and started to pull the ident into tokens.

“What are you doing?” Ted asked her.

“I'm doing a traceback,” she replied. “Like the captain told me to.”

“I think you're missing the big picture here, Jess,” he began, but she interrupted him.

“I am missing fucking nothing, Shimada,” she said. “What have we got?”

“We've got Lancaster nosing around something with Valentis; we've got Valentis and MacBride cozying up to Shadow Ops; we've got PSI . . . doing something; we've got—”

“What do we have that's concrete? That we can prove?” She stopped her work long enough to glare at him. “We have a bunch of fucking hearsay, that's what we have. And four messages with the same bogus, anonymous ident, all addressed to our mysteriously dead captain, and all about the
Phoenix.
I deal with data, Ted,” she said shortly, returning her eyes to the screen. “This is all the data I have, and I'm going to dissect it until it tells me something I can use.”

She felt Ted staring at her, but she would not meet his eyes. He was softhearted, and she thought if she looked any longer at the pain on his face she would fall apart.

“Okay,” he said at last. “I can pick up the investigation on Danny. I've got to be on duty, but I can snoop from engineering.
Maybe we can figure out why all of this seems to point toward the
Phoenix.
”

She stilled her hands. “He knew it,” she said quietly, her chest tight. “Foster. He knew it was all connected, but he didn't trust himself. Do you know people sent him bullshit conspiracy messages about the
Phoenix
every year? Since he was a kid? All this time, we sort of rolled our eyes when he got out of sorts around the anniversary, and there are people out there who deliberately fucked with his head. This kid who lost his mother.” She shook her head. “He might have trusted himself if they hadn't. I'd like to find every one of those motherfuckers and rip their lungs out through their ribs.”

Ted flashed her a smile, a shadow of his old self. “I'm glad you love me, Jess,” he said.

“Get the fuck out, Teddy.”

She had lost herself in her work before he was out of the room.

Elsewhere

E
lena did not know how long they were inside the wormhole. Whether it was adrenaline or some artifact of the object itself, she had no sense of time passing. She felt Trey's arms around her, and his sturdy form against her body as she held on to him. She could feel a pounding—her heart or his, she did not know—but her ears were full of a strange, soundless thunder that swallowed all the noises around her, and when she tried to speak she felt as if her lungs were out of air.

They seemed to be plunging through a tunnel, although it was nothing like any tunnel she had ever seen. It was too wide and too narrow for them; it twisted and turned and folded in on itself with mathematical impossibility. They were moving in and out of it, and shaping it at the same time; it thrashed and grabbed at them like a living thing. Occasionally parts of it split off, like great capillaries. Once she thought she saw stars at the end of a branch, and she wondered if there were different destinations. If they could learn to navigate something like this, it might take them anywhere. The longer she stared at it, the more she was certain that somehow it made sense, that if she stopped
thinking and let her mind open, she would understand, would be able to explain it, would know what it was . . .

And then abruptly they were back in normal space, and she could hear Trey's heartbeat and
Sartre
's alarms and the whining of their damaged mechanical systems. She could see the wormhole, a glowing dot growing smaller as they spun away from it; and as they pitched and yawed, the bright green-gray of a planet was flanked by the glow of a yellow sun.

They let go of each other, Trey sitting back in the pilot's seat to pull up the instruments again. He used their thrusters to still the ship, leaving them hovering over the huge rock below. They were over the planet's dark side, the sun's corona visible over the horizon. The planet itself was featureless from this height; ice, she supposed, or cloud cover. At first blush it appeared to be the sort of planet Central explorers would dismiss as too inhospitable for terraforming.

“Do you know it?” Trey asked her.

She shook her head. She knew the Fourth Sector cold, and parts of the others, but she had heard of no planets spinning under the watchful eye of a wormhole. “Let's see if we can figure out where we are.”

Trey assessed the engines and the nav while Elena took a closer look at the ship's computer and sensory systems. The vocal interface was off-line, but much to her surprise the core appeared to be intact. Beyond their field generator and their flight controls, the damage they had taken seemed relatively light. They had no fine sensors, and the power system would support nothing more than the anemic emergency lights; but they still had atmosphere, and heat, and sufficient insulation
from the vacuum outside. “Whoever built this thing saved our lives,” she said, and she heard Trey laugh.

“I cannot imagine they thought of making it wormhole-proof,” he said. “Can you get sensors?”

“I think so. Crude ones, at least.”

“Navigation may be reparable,” he told her. “And our stellar collectors are intact. We may not have a field, but we will be able to move. Perhaps head back through.”

She said nothing to that. Part of her never wanted to get near that thing again. Part of her longed for it. Mostly she wanted to stay very still, and breathe, and figure out where the hell they were.

The ship's voice feedback was down, but the text display was working, and she sat back, relieved, feeling like she wasn't blind anymore.

“
Sartre,
where are we?”

Nothing. She frowned.

“
Sartre,
can you hear me?”

Instantly, the ship displayed
Yes.

“Can you tell me where we are?”

Silence again. She checked the comms activity; it was calling out to the stream, trying to connect to a data source, and finding nothing.

Suddenly she felt blind again.

“
Sartre,
consult your internal star charts and see if anything around here looks at all familiar.”

She watched as the ship spun through its stored maps.
No matches,
it said at last.

Nothing?
“Anything recognizable at all?”

No.

“How far are you scanning? How far out can you match?”

Fourteen million light years.

“You're telling me that in fourteen million light years, there are no astronomical objects that you recognize, even partially.”

That is correct.

She felt Trey watching her, and she looked over at him, expecting to see dread, or anger. Instead, he was smiling, that familiar kindness in his eyes. “We seem to be a long way from home,” he remarked. “But we are alive,
m'laya.
That is not a bad place to begin.”

A light began to flash on Elena's sensor display. “What is it?” she asked.

An object has appeared. Current trajectory will take it within five kilometers of our location.

“Can you get a visual?”

Not from this orientation.

Trey spun them 180 degrees, and they saw it: approaching from the wormhole, with alarming speed, was the gray bird.

Or rather, she realized after a moment of panic, the remains of the gray bird. Its wings were gone, and the light emanating from its stern was fire rather than a working engine. The exterior was scarred and burned, and huge chunks of metal sheeting had been sheared off. It was possible the pilot was alive somewhere in that mess, but if he was, he was not in control of the ship's movements. It tumbled over and over, skimming past them close enough to make Elena flinch; and then it plummeted toward the planet. She saw a glow as it hit the atmosphere, saw the glow flare, and then it vanished.

“What happened to it?” she asked.

The ship paused before answering.
Insufficient data,
it said at last.

“Explain.”

The planet is producing radiation. I cannot read into the radiation field.

She glanced over at Trey. “How much radiation?”

Radiation at the stratosphere is 5.9 ambient, 6.2 critical.

“What's the radiation out here?”

Radiation at this location is 4.4 ambient, 5.4 critical.

She swore; her brain had gone slow. She should have asked that first. “How long can your shielding last?”

Seven hours, eight minutes, twenty-three seconds before internal radiation becomes damaging.

“We need to get away from that planet,” she said, and Trey nodded. “
Sartre,
” she asked, “how far away can we get in seven hours, eight minutes, and twenty-three seconds?”

Insufficient momentum to evade radioactive damage. Power supply required.

“We should see what we can read from the wormhole,” he said, turning them away from the planet. “Without our attacker on the other side, it may be just as simple as going back through.”

The light flashed again, and Elena cursed. She knew, this time, what it was.

“It got him, too,” she said.

They watched as
Lusitania
came drifting toward them.

Elena kept her eyes on
Lusitania
as Trey guided them closer to the troop ship.
Lusi
was adrift, neither under power nor on fire, and the cabin appeared intact; but she was moving more slowly than the gray bird, tumbling out of control. Elena had to resist
the urge to shove Trey out of the way and gun their own damaged engines. They needed to stop
Lusi
's free fall before she hit the planet's atmosphere and was swallowed as well.

She remembered the moment Jake died, swept from the universe as if he had never existed. She had learned to live with the hollow wound he had left, but she never deceived herself that she was not still bleeding. Greg had to be all right. There was not enough of her left to keep going if he was not all right.

“Can we dock with her?” Trey asked her.

His steady voice drew her out of her panic. “Yes. I think so. There's an access panel in her hull. As long as our door didn't get completely clobbered, we should be able to get a hard seal between the ships.”

He nodded, and kept his eyes on the window, steering as much by sight as by instruments. She got to her feet and went to the ship's door, methodically checking the locking mechanism. Everything tested green, each joint moving smoothly and easily, and she sent another silent thank you to the owner's willingness to buy quality. The faster transport they had left in Novanadyr would have been pulled apart by the wormhole, if it had managed to survive the dogfight in the first place.

With a few judicious nudges Trey matched
Lusitania
's rotation, and they began spiraling closer to her. Elena engaged the interior magnetic locks that would compensate for any small inaccuracies in their position; after a moment the locks blinked, indicating a handshake with
Lusi
's docking system. Leaving the ships to handle the final contact, she turned to the closet in the back of the cabin and pulled out two emergency suits. Draping one over the seat next to Trey, she climbed into the other, pulling it hurriedly over her clothes.

“Do we have any readings over there?” she asked.

“One moment,” he said. With a quiet
snick,
the two ships locked together, and he pulled up
Sartre
's crude sensors. “No gravity,” he told her. “Oxygen density is sufficient for life support, but low. There is a slow leak.”

She pulled the clear hood over her head and ran her fingers over the seal at her neck. Her fingers were shaking; she tried twice before Trey stood and put his hands over hers. “Let me,” he said gently.

She took a deep breath and dropped her hands. Quickly and expertly he zipped the seal closed, then reached for the other suit. When he pulled his hood on she returned the favor, her hands steadier.
Safety first,
her trainers at Central Military Academy had always said. Y
ou can't rescue anyone else if you are suffocating.

Greg had air. She had time.

Trey handed her the medkit from the bathroom, and pulled a small leak repair kit from the cabinet next to the wardrobe. Elena opened the inner door, exposing
Lusitania
's belly, and with a few practiced twists, had the access panel open.

There was a rush as air flooded from their ship to
Lusitania.
Elena took a hesitant step through the doorway, gripping the handholds beside
Lusi
's door as she stepped out of their artificial gravity field.
Lusi
's access panel was in her floor, and it took Elena a moment to orient herself to seeing the ship sideways. She looked toward the pilot's seat.

He was strapped into the seat, wearing a suit, facing away from her toward the ship's front window. She pushed toward him, her heart pounding. He should have heard them come in. He should have said something.

She came around and saw his face. His eyes were wide open, their mottled depths reflecting the gray planet, and for a black, bottomless instant she thought he was dead. Then he blinked, slowly, and she recognized disorientation. “What's the oxygen in here?” she asked Trey.

“Ninety-six percent and rising,” he told her. He pushed across to the front corner of the cabin and stabilized himself, opening up the repair kit.

She pinched the seal at Greg's neck and yanked the hood off his head. “Greg?” she said.

He blinked again, and shook his head. “What—” he breathed.

“Greg.”
She activated the scanner and started with his head. No concussion, no measurable brain damage.

“How is he?” Trey asked.

“Conscious,” she said tersely. She set the scanner aside carefully. “Greg, can you hear me?”

This time he seemed to focus. He met her eyes, frowning, confused; and then she saw him recognize her. His eyes lightened, and he smiled, and for one moment she was thrown back six months, looking into the face of the man she knew. “Elena,” he said, full of wonder. “Did you see it?”

She knew what he meant. He had fallen through that great, flashing living thing as well. “I did,” she replied gently. “Are you all right, Greg?”

His eyes shifted to the window, and then over to Trey, before they returned to her face. “A little startled to be alive,” he said. “Where are we?”

“Just outside the wormhole,” Trey told him. “Our ships are docked. We are unable to establish our location.”

“Unable—” He turned back to Trey, frowning. “I remem
ber taking
Lusi
after you. I remember . . .” His eyes widened. “There was another ship.”

“It came through before you did,” Elena told him. “It crashed on that planet.”

He shook his head. “Not that one.” His eyes focused on Trey's. “It was
Penumbra.
”

Trey's expression froze. “Did they take damage?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Greg said quietly. “They were hit, but I didn't have incoming comms. It didn't seem to affect their maneuverability, or their weapons.
Penumbra
's the one who shot down that bird,” he told them. “Saved my life.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask if that was enough to convince him MacBride was full of shit, but there were more important issues to deal with.

“That planet is radioactive, Greg,” she explained. “We need to get away from here.”

He looked back at her, still puzzled. He was not yet quite himself, she realized; he still looked pleased to see her. She felt a flicker of worry, and of annoyance; but he was alive, and mostly himself, and soon enough everything would be the way it was.

And then maybe she could get some answers.

“We have gravity over there,” she told him. “Come on.”

He fumbled with the harness, and in the end she had to pull it off for him, gripping his arm as she untangled the straps from his limbs. He braced his hand against the floor and slowly walked himself hand-over-hand toward the hatch. By the time he got there he had remembered his training; he swung himself through legs first, his feet steadily on the ground by the time he transferred the rest of his body weight into the gravity field. She floated behind him as he stood, his hand still gripping the edge
of the little ship's doorway, and she resisted the urge to hold out an arm to steady him.