The Burning Dark (21 page)

“I said
for the moment
. Until we get this situation under control, I’m officially reinstating you to service.”

Ida opened his mouth again, but he wasn’t sure what to say. King raised an eyebrow.

Reinstated to service? It was a surprise, but it made sense. Orders changed all the time in war, often suddenly; Ida had plenty of experience with that. And King was right. If the station was under threat, they needed everyone to pull together.

Ida felt a smile grow on his face. He saw King look at him, and quickly brought himself to attention. He snapped a salute.

“Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland reporting for duty,
sir
!”

King nodded and moved back around behind his desk. With the marshal’s back turned, Ida glanced sideways at Serra, but she was motionless, her glazed eyes fixed on the wall. On Ida’s other side, Izanami had that damn smile on her face again.

“At ease, Captain,” King said as he sat behind the desk. “We need to flush out our rats, and quick. This station needs to be secure for our VIPs. I’m giving you a chance here, Captain. You say you’re a hero? Show us. You and Psi-Sergeant Serra will assemble your teams. Dismissed.”

Serra’s heels clicked as she came to life. “Understood, sir.” The marine spun elegantly around, snapped her heels again, and left the office at a formal march.

Ida and King regarded each other for a few moments. Then King nodded, and this time the smile on his face seemed genuine. Ida saluted and glanced at Izanami, who at last tore her eyes off the wall and looked at him, her smile still firmly in place. Ida turned back to the marshal, said “sir,” then waved at Izanami. “Come on,” he said, and he turned to leave.

“I’ll monitor from here, Captain,” said King.

Ida turned back. “Ah … yes, sir.” He frowned, nodded at Izanami, and left.

*   *   *

Each of the twenty-three
decks of the vast torus structure that formed the bulk of the
Coast City
had a series of large atriums at the four compass points that housed both passenger and service elevators and other access points. Ida had picked the northern lobby on Deck 20 as the closest one to Carter’s incident. Ida told Serra he’d meet her in twenty minutes at the assembly point nearest to her cabin.

Then he returned to his quarters to prepare for the bug hunt. While the
Coast City
had an ample supply of uniforms, fatigues, and combat suits, Ida preferred his own, custom suit, brought with him from his own U-Star. He’d clung to it like a safety blanket, a reminder that he wasn’t crazy, that he had served the Fleet and retired with honor. As he stood in his cabin, holding the combat jacket in his hands, he rubbed a thumb over the rank insignia and the small silver bar sewn onto the left breast.
You don’t get that,
he thought,
from being a liar
.

Ida was surprised to find himself needing the combat suit again, surprised to find himself suddenly wielding authority after his confinement to quarters. But damn, did it feel good. He’d given his life to the Fleet, only to end up in forced retirement. But now the provost marshal had stepped up, shown his faith, and Ida was a captain again, combat suit and all.

Unfortunately, he’d have to wear it incomplete—the helmet sat on a shelf in the cupboard, the psi-fi link between it and the rest of the suit somehow unable to pair, no matter how many times Ida cycled the system.

“Are you excited?”

He turned, looking up from the jacket. Izanami was standing in the cabin’s open door, and he realized that he’d been rude, leaving her to trail behind him while he was lost in his own world.

“How’s Carter?”

Izanami stepped in, her eyes glittering in the cabin’s subdued lighting. “Oh, he’ll be fine. He’s well looked after.”

“Good, good.” Ida tossed the jacket onto the bed and went to drag the rest of his combat gear out of one of the lockers. He thought he heard her soft footfalls on the floor and then a rustle behind him as she sat on his bed. He was about to ask who, exactly, was looking after Carter, but then he found the rest of his combat suit. He yanked it from under a pile of other bits and turned around.

Ida paused, then looked over at his desk. The silver oblong of the space radio was there, plugged in, the blue LED shining bright. Which was odd, since he didn’t remember seeing it as he’d come into his cabin, and the blue light really was bright in the half-lit cabin. He walked over to the desk, running a finger along the top of the radio. He couldn’t believe it was there.

“What’s this—?”

“I brought it back,” said Izanami. “Thought you might like to listen to her again.”

Ida whistled. “King is going to throw you out of an air lock when he finds out.” He turned to the bed. Izanami’s words bothered him more than he cared to admit as he picked up the last pieces of his kit—gloves, belt, shoulder utility harness covered in pouches and metal snap-rings for holding additional equipment. “Time to get this bug hunt under way. Will you stay here? If there are rats, they may run. I can get a marine on the door.”

Izanami shook her head. “I’ll be fine. I’ll lock the door.”

Ida nodded. “Keep it quiet and keep it dark,” he said. He adjusted his gloves and then nodded a farewell.

“She’s a mystery, isn’t she?”

Ida froze at the cabin door. “Um…”

“She blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in May 1961 and never returned.”

When he turned around, Izanami was standing right behind him. She smiled and Ida felt cold, even under his intelligent combat suit.

“A space pioneer,” she said, “lost on reentry.” Her eyes flashed blue, reflecting the light of the subspace radio. “Dead for a thousand years.”

Why Izanami found the whole thing so amusing, Ida wasn’t sure. But there wasn’t time to discuss it now. She was right, the message
was
a mystery, and clearly she’d spent some more time unpicking the signal, getting a better fix on its origin. But now there was real work to be done, hunting down the infiltrators and securing the station. As King had said, he had a chance now to show who he really was. It was time to move on.

“Fine,” he said, surprising himself with the hardness of his voice. He pointed at the subspace radio. “As soon as we’ve secured the station, that needs to go back to wherever King stowed it.”

Izanami took a step backwards, never letting her gaze drop from Ida’s. Ida shivered. He supposed the recording had become a little obsession for her too. After all, she had nothing to do around the station. But he knew now that he should never have built the damned thing. Getting rid of it would be the best decision, for Izanami and for him.

“But right now I need you to stay here.” Ida turned and headed toward Serra’s rendezvous, adjusting the buckle on his equipment harness as he did, trying to remember why Carter’s description of the red letters
CCCP
on the infiltrator’s space suit was familiar.

22

Serra was waiting for
Ida, and suddenly Ida felt he was out of place, his earlier bravado evaporating. His combat suit was a dark blue and he was missing the helmet, while Serra and her team were clad in the
Coast City
’s olive green battlesuits.

Get it together, Captain.

As he approached, Serra turned and flipped the visor of her helmet up and looked him up and down. Ida smiled tightly but Serra didn’t say anything, instead tossing him a small rifle identical to the one she and the others were carrying. Ida caught the weapon and checked the small ammunition indicator display on the butt. It was loaded with soft ceramic shells, lethal to flesh and blood but, in the event of a full-on shoot-out, unable to penetrate far into the interior skin of the space station. The last thing you wanted to do in a crisis was breach the hull and pop everyone inside the station like overripe grapes.

“Thanks,” said Ida, clipping the weapon to the webbing across the front of his combat suit. He felt better. “What’s the plan, marine?”

Serra glanced over the assembled troops—Ida counted the two security officers who had kept him confined to his cabin among the ten marines present. The task force was a small but impressive one. Fully armored up and with helmet visors closed, they looked like a cluster of particularly angry turtles standing on their hind legs.

“The central core of the
Coast City
is locked off with marines patrolling key thoroughfares and junctions,” said Serra. “Observation drones are monitoring other access points. That leaves us with the hub itself, eighty percent of which is uninhabitable.”

“Observation drones?”

Serra nodded. “We’ve borrowed some demolition robots and set them to cover the access wells leading to the bridge and spire. Those areas are open to space, but might make an ideal access point for our rats.”

Ida smirked. “I’d hate to come up against a demolition drone programmed to be a security guard.”

Serra’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Exactly.”

“With the lockdown active, how many levels do we need to cover?”

“Just eleven. We split into two teams, start at opposite ends, top and bottom, then spiral toward the center clockwise and anticlockwise. Even if the rats manage to keep ahead of us, we’ll have them squeezed between the two groups.” Serra pulled a narrow rectangular computer pad from the holster on her thigh and held it up to Ida. As he watched, her gauntleted finger traced a map of their route through the station.

It was a nice plan, and a simple one. Ida had wondered whether scouring an entire space station was beyond the capabilities of the skeleton crew, even with him freshly recruited, but with the patrol points and observation drones doing most of their work, all they had to accomplish was a coordinated sweep that would force any infiltrators out into the open. Serra had done a good job, and he said so.

“Thank you, Captain.”

Ida smiled.
Captain
. Yep, it was a good feeling. He was back at work.

Serra seemed to notice and grinned; then she turned to the other marines. “Decker, Blackmoore, Ahuriri, Reitman, with me. Lawrence, Perrett, Leena, Newman, follow Captain Cleveland.”

She turned back to Ida. “Top or bottom?”

He looked at the ceiling. “Up, please.”

Serra nodded. “Let’s roll.”

*   *   *

For the first time
in … oh, a
long
time, Ida felt less like a spare part and more like the old Captain Cleveland. Taking point of his party of five, stalking forward slowly, rifle raised and sighted all the way, he immersed himself in the mission, losing himself in years of training and combat experience. He was in control, and that felt good, but there was more to it. He was
needed
and
trusted
. King’s vote of confidence seemed to have brought Serra around too, which was, Ida thought, a small first step on the long journey to winning back the respect he deserved aboard the
Coast City
.

Ida stepped forward slowly, bulkhead to bulkhead, door to door, sweeping his weapon in front of him. It was pretty quiet so far, just the gentle tapping of the marines’ boots behind him and the occasional plastic creak of their armor.

The provost marshal wasn’t so bad. Uptight, sure. A manager rather than a warrior, but the Fleet needed both. It was just a shame, Ida thought, that the commandant wasn’t aboard. He’d liked to have met him.

They kept moving. The passageways were still on minimum power, with the automatics turned off so that their progress wouldn’t be heralded by the ceiling tiles lighting up as they moved. Ida regretted his lack of helmet, as it meant he had to rely on the enhanced sight on his rifle to see his way ahead clearly in the low light well.

“Leena,” said Ida, still walking forward in formation, rifle sight playing the empty space in front of him as the squad crawled forward.

“Sir,” came the marine’s reply, her voice echoing electronically from behind her visor.

“When did the commandant leave?”

“He left before the last transport, sir.”

Ida clicked his tongue, and they passed a bulkhead and began following the curve of the outer wall.

“Wasn’t the one before that months ago? I thought he’d left recently?”

There was a pause before Leena answered. Ida could hear her breathing get heavier behind her helmet microphone.

“He left just before you arrived … I think.”

Ida pursed his lips. “So he somehow managed to get off the station
between
transports?”

“Sir, I don’t understand?”

“Never mind.”

They walked on in silence. What had
really
happened to the commandant? Maybe Leena had got mixed up and he had left in a transport. That was the most obvious explanation, but with the current situation aboard the
Coast City,
Ida found his thoughts stirring some nastier suspicions. Had there been a coup, or a mutiny, King overthrowing his commanding officer? No, King didn’t want to be in charge; that much was clear. Perhaps the commandant had been kidnapped by the infiltrators. Maybe what was left of his body was in orbit around Shadow, a carbonized ember floating in that star’s toxic light a million klicks from the station. Maybe …

“Sir, shall we continue?”

Ida blinked and raised his eye from the gun sight to look back at Leena, following immediately behind. He realized he’d stopped moving. A trickle of sweat, salty and cold, ran onto his upper lip. Dammit, he needed to focus. But his knee had started hurting, and—

“Marine, what ambient temperature does your suit read?”

“Eighteen point five, environment normal.”

“
External
ambient.”

Leena’s helmet tilted just a little as she called up the display inside her visor and scanned the data.

“Fourteen point three. No, point oh … thirteen two … thirteen … twelve five … twelve … eleven … ten five…”

The temperature was dropping rapidly. Ida nodded, and Leena stopped reading out her display. The marines behind her looked at one another.

The sweat on Ida’s face was now like an icy cloth stuck to his skin. Environment failure had become an increasingly common occurrence on board the
Coast City,
and Ida knew it meant just one thing: Something unusual was about to happen. Something else was giving him a warning too—the psi-fi link in his knee was acting up. Interference.