The Burning Dark (26 page)

“Hello?” People were constantly asking him whether he liked the dark, or the night, considering he was a starchild. He usually answered that while space might be black, it was really full of light, as bright as can be, in every color—total baloney, but not many people he met were familiar with Olbers’ paradox. And it hid the fact that no, Ivanhoe did not like the dark. In fact, he hated the dark.

Now, in the control cabin of the
Bloom County,
the black shadows disturbed him more than he liked.

“Dominos…”

He ducked away from the sound, a harsh whisper with an odd accent right in his ear. He banged the tool bench with his thigh and gasped at the pain, one hand automatically brushing at the side of his head. For a second he imagined the tickling sensation of someone’s breath in his ear as the voice spoke to him.

“Where are you?” He squinted again. Something silver flashed in front of him, then another, then a third. Glinting with light, the objects wobbled in the air.

The tools. Two crescent wrenches, brand-new and still nicely chromed, and the heavy electric socket driver. They hovered five feet from the floor, dipping a little around their balance points, like someone was dangling them from above on thin wire.

“The poisoned sky weeps for my husband.…”

The navigator jerked his head away again as the whispering voice came from the other side. The intruder would have had to be crouching right on the control desk, up against the right-hand window pane, to breathe into his ear like that. The voice, feminine but not human. Empty and black. Like the dark shadows themselves were speaking.

The floating tools ducked and dived, then stabilized. Ivanhoe couldn’t tear his eyes from them. He kept his distance as he walked around the edge of the control cabin, toward the main consoles.

What the hell was going on? It was that star, had to be, something to do with its light. The data sheet fed to them by the Fleet said it was “toxic”—whatever the hell that meant—and earlier one of the jarheads on the station had even said “that light will fuck you up,” like it was some kind of a joke, although he hadn’t been laughing. But the way their nav pod had scrambled as soon as they’d hit the system’s heliosphere made Ivanhone think again.

“Dominos Tararaz…”

The light. It had to be the light. The weird star and its weird starlight.

That light will fuck you up.

Behind him the malfunctioning nav pod output screen flickered with new data, and the ship’s computer alerted the navigator to that fact with a loud chime. Were those shapes moving around there? Long, thin figures, pulling themselves together out of the mist? Ivanhoe risked a glance over his shoulder. He saw enough on the output screen to know the nav pod had apparently not only fixed itself but aligned itself with the system’s star. The information streaming across the screen didn’t make much sense, consisting of a list of coordinates that looked okay but, he saw at a glance, were inverted,
negative,
like the computer was looking
through
the star and into someplace else, which was fucking nuts but—

The mining legs. Ivanhoe was drawn to the indicator lights, all eight flashing as all eight legs flexed. The Spiderbaby was dreaming, and dreaming deep. Maybe he was as well.

Ivanhoe looked up at the window, hoping for a reassuring, familiar look at the stars. But the windows were almost completely black now, the view transformed into a dull mirror. He saw nothing but his own face, floating in the shadows, lit from underneath by the scrolling amber text of the nav pod output and the flashing indicators.

Then over his right shoulder, another face. Ghastly white, angular, with a sharp chin and oval eyes that burned with a bright baby blue light. The face was that of a woman, pale and Japanese. Her hair was long and black and straight and blew in a nonexistent wind across her face. She looked Ivanhoe in the eye and smiled a smile from hell.

“Where is he, Dominos? Where is he?”

Ivanhoe’s scream was not as manly as he’d hoped. But what the hell. The conscious centers of his brain relinquished the last vestige of control to his brain stem, and as his bladder emptied, everything spun to blackness.

28

Maybe I’m getting old.

Ida ran the thought through his head. He was forty years old, and he was tired and sick of spooning the blue protein gloop from plate to mouth in the canteen. Too much time in space. He was alone on one side of the eating area, watching Carter’s space apes and the Hollywood gang merge into one shouting, swearing mass. Carter had recovered from his ordeal and seemed to be back to his old self. Serra sat by his side and laughed at the right moments but said nothing herself, and over the top of his spoon Ida could see her eyes narrow again, like she was fighting against a migraine.

The visiting crew of the
Bloom County
laughed and joked and slapped sides with their hosts, but they also exchanged looks and smirks and eye rolls among themselves that Carter’s friends didn’t notice. Ida did. It cheered him up no end.

Ida realized he was staring at the group when he saw Zia Hollywood returning the look. Eyes still wrapped in the mining goggles, she sat at the head of the table, cradling a shallow beaker of engine juice, the toxic liquid DeJohn had distilled out of the space station’s cooling system before he’d gone missing. Ida had seen her laugh too, smile at the right people, but she wasn’t really part of the group. She could never be—the fame and fortune attached to her name kept her distant from everyone around her, even her own crew.

Ida smiled, but not at Ms. Hollywood. In the time she’d spent returning his stare, she’d probably earned more in pure interest than the annual wages of everyone on the
Coast City
combined. She had the kind of wealth that could buy planets.

Ida sucked the spoonful of protein past his teeth and returned his attention to his plate.

“Fancy pulling up a pew and joining the party?”

Ida looked up. It was the first time he’d heard her speak. Her voice was strong and melodic, deeper than he expected and bathed in a golden accent. Her voice had a breathless quality; it crossed Ida’s mind that she might be a good singer.

Zia’s call had halted all conversation at her table, and Ida felt his face grow hot. Carter frowned at him, but Serra kept her eyes on the table. Ida knew he’d have to talk to her, and soon.

“We brought some food from our ship. Condensed nutrient from Earth, farm fresh.”

Carter muttered something, and Serra touched his elbow. A few of the others laughed and turned back to the table.

“Well, I’m honored, but—”

“It tastes like chicken.”

Ida dropped his spoon and pushed the metal tray away from him. “Count me in.”

He picked a spot two seats down from Zia, on the opposite side of the table to Carter. Ida made sure he smiled and made eye contact with everyone at the table. On his right, between him and Zia, Fathead worked his jaw, the wet sound of his chewing obscenely loud as he looked Ida up and down.

“Now, ain’t you gonna introduce us?” asked Zia Hollywood, seemingly to the table at large. Her chest moved as she spoke, the black singlet featureless but tight. Ida found himself swallowing a trickle of hot saliva. Oh, she was good. Being a genuine A-lister meant being able to turn it on and play the game anytime, anywhere.

Carter coughed, and Ida stuck out his hand. Ms. Hollywood looked at it and didn’t move. Izanami’s earlier comment played at the back of his mind.

“Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland, ma’am. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Hollywood pulled her bottom lip—pierced with a small silver loop just to the left of center—into her mouth, and Ida watched as she chewed it with her top teeth. Up close her square goggles had a greenish hue but were completely opaque, showing nothing but a double reflection of Ida grinning back at himself.

“Ain’t captains supposed to salute?”

Ida let his hand fall away. “I’m retired, ma’am.” He frowned. “Or … I was, and then I wasn’t. It’s a little complicated.”

Fathead chuckled through clenched teeth, eyes half-closed in amusement. “You don’t sound too sure. If you were retired, why are you here?” he asked.

“Good question,” said Carter.

Zia raised a hand to the opposite shoulder, and from the corner of his eye, Ida thought he saw her moving tattoo dive down from her shoulder to her wrist, a thin twisting veil of black shadow forming a strange, streaking figurelike shape. He jerked his head back in surprise and blinked.

“Can’t rightly say,” he said, clearing his head. “Although upon the retirement of a senior officer—that’s me, by the way—Fleet command is at liberty to issue one final set of orders. Usually it’s a friendly gesture, like reporting to the Fleet college library to present your final log file to the custodian of special collections. Happened to a friend of mine. Sounded nice. Or it might be something more formal, like christening a new U-Star.”

“And you?” Zia asked.

Ida laughed. “And then there’s me. Well, apparently I have to close this hunk of junk down.” He looked Carter in the eye. “Can’t happen soon enough.”

Fathead snickered and jogged Ida’s elbow, passing him a plastic container stacked with gelatinous beige cubes. “Dig in, bro. It’s on us.”

Ida took the container and loaded his plate, then paused before carefully placing it back to the center of the table. He counted around the table again.

“Am I in someone’s seat?”

Zia shook her head, mouth in her beaker. “Ivanhoe is back on the
County,
taking care of some last-minute work.” Ida could hear the wet pop as Hollywood’s lips parted when she spoke. When she finished speaking, she held her mouth just so, in a moody pout perfect for the camera lens. Perhaps she wasn’t just good, thought Ida. Perhaps she was a natural. “Our nav pod is temperamental, always has been. The Spider tech interferes with it something fierce. It went offline completely when we entered this system.”

Ida nodded and started to say something about the nature of the star in this particular system, but as he squashed a cube of nutrient between his tongue and the roof of his mouth he was hit by the note-perfect taste of hot roast chicken, fresh from a farm oven. His words tailed off and he sighed, just a little.

Fathead jostled his elbow again. “Good, no?” He looked over the table at Carter. “Eh?”

Carter grinned and raised his spork in a toast. “Sure is, my man. I haven’t eaten like this in years.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the other marines, most of whom Ida didn’t know by name. Ida caught Dathan and Fathead exchanging another look. This was the night’s entertainment for them.

“The radiation from Shadow has a strange effect on electronics,” said Ida, picking up the thread of his thoughts. “It’s taken out our lightspeed link already. I presume you’ve got the right shielding on the pod?”

“Yeah,” said Zia. “We’re all good. Just needs recalibrating.”

Dathan leaned forward on the table, peering around Ida at his boss. “We’re gonna need that pod working if we’re going to hit our target, Zia.”

“Cool your boots. We’re good.”

Ida took another mouthful. The gelatin cube crushed to mush in his mouth, and when he breathed in through his nose he could feel the moisture of the steam rising from the nonexistent chicken meal.

Ida turned to Zia. “And what are
you
doing out here? Or is that a secret known only to you and Fleet command?”

“No secret, Cap’n.” Zia seemed to relax, putting aside her beaker of drink and tipping a few food cubes onto her plate. On the other side of the table, Carter and his marines began talking among themselves, clearly refusing to be part of a conversation started by Ida. Zia chewed slowly and spoke with her mouth full. He watched his own reflection in her goggles as she ate.

“There’s a small field of asteroids on the other side of Shadow. Hardly rocks even, more like a debris field of some kind. Maybe a half dozen big chunks, and a lot of dust and sand. They read mighty strange. Slowrocks. Nearly pure lucanol, ninety-eight percent, according to the readouts from your very own station computer. Lucky we got word before your lightspeed went south. So we hightailed it across Fleetspace to take a look-see. Your station is a pit stop. A bit of free PR for the Fleet in exchange for the tip-off.”

Ida whistled and then dabbed his mouth with a canteen paper napkin. “Didn’t think that was possible, an entire asteroid made of lucanol. How does it hold together? Must be as soft as your chicken cubes.”

The two greenish black windows shielding her eyes were still pointed in Ida’s direction, so he assumed she was looking at him. Then she smiled.

It was a beautiful smile, the kind of smile the paparazzi would have paid a fortune to see and to broadcast around the Earth and all her outposts. Ida thought he was probably very privileged to see it firsthand, sitting not one foot from the famous lips. Zia had a blue gray gem embedded in one of her upper teeth—spoils of her profession, no doubt. Ida suspected the tiny sparkling stone was worth more than the rug, the painting, and the matchwood in King’s ready room put together. Ida knew at once that hardly anybody had a smile like this. This was the smile of a person rich and famous for a very good reason.

“That’s what we’re gonna go and find out,” she said.

“And the Fleet just fed you the readings from this station, just like that? Would have thought that kind of data would be classified.” Ida smiled. “Or encrypted, at least.”

“That’s what
they
think,” said Dathan, tapping his metal spoon against the side of his tray four times, each tap with more force than the last until he let go of the utensil, letting it clatter across the table. Carter and the marines halted their conversation and looked at the spoon and then Zia’s crewman.

Zia’s expression tightened. “Go and help Ivanhoe with the nav pod.”

The spoonless Dathan began rocking the edge of his food tray against the tabletop, making an annoying metallic clacking that increased in volume. Ida suddenly didn’t feel like sitting between him and his boss.