The Cold Between

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.”

“None of them do.”

“But Central is still letting MacBride file this work of fiction.”

His lips tightened. “He’s an experienced Corps captain, Elena, and a die-hard patriot. And why in the hell would Niall MacBride make up a story that makes him sound like a coward?”

True enough … MacBride was all ego and bravado, but he did his job, and he did not have a reputation for running away. “So Central thinks something is up with PSI.”

“Central is watching very carefully right now.”

“So carefully they will let Volhynia convict a man for murder who had nothing to do with it.”

His face took on a careful expression. “Kind of a coincidence,” he said, “that of all the people in that bar, Zajec talked to you.”

Bastard, she thought, but something had occurred to her. “Listen—I’ll allow for the possibility that it wasn’t my wit and charm that made him take me home.” She hated saying it. She certainly did not believe it—not after last night. “But think about this: let’s suppose, for a moment, that PSI has some secret scheme that involves making MacBride look chickenshit, and picking off our mid-level infantry grunts one at a time. Does Central really want Captain Zajec in the hands of the authorities on Volhynia? Where by the end of the day they’ll have him locked up in some room so far belowground he’ll never see sunlight again? It makes no sense, does it?”

Please, she thought at Greg. Please understand what I’m saying.

He was staring away from her, his eyes aimed at the herb garden, seeing nothing. “Why do I feel like you’d say anything to get me to agree to this?”

“Because I’m right,” she told him, “and you know it.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Central won’t want him locked up on Volhynia,” he said, “but they’re not going to want him running around free, either.”

That was an angle she had not thought of. “But—”

“You can’t have it both ways, Elena. You tell me he’s useful? I agree. That means we use him.”

“He’s retired, for God’s sake,” she snapped. “He doesn’t know what happened to Demeter.”

“And you know this how?” He opened his eyes and stared at her, his gaze hard. “This isn’t some guy you picked up at a school dance. This is a PSI captain who runs into you while we are on alert. Central isn’t going to buy ‘he’s retired.’”

“And you don’t, either, do you?” She felt anger taking over again. “It’s so easy for you to believe that he could have fooled me, that I could have turned a blind eye to some fucking conspiracy.”

“And it’s so easy for you to dismiss the possibility because the guy’s got some personal charm.” Before she could object, he added, “Will you fucking think for a second? You want to believe this guy? Fine. But think about how it looks from the outside, to people who’ve never met him. We need to talk to him, Elena. This isn’t about tact or diplomacy, this is about people shooting at each other.”

“So you want me to arrest him.”

“I want you to do what you have to do to get him up here,” he told her. “Appeal to his better nature. I’m sure he doesn’t want war any more than we do.”

And yet we’re the ones talking about taking prisoners. She shook her head. “I’ll get him released, Greg. But if you want him up here, either he comes willingly or you send someone else down to grab him. I won’t do it.”

She saw his jaw set and his fists clench, and she wondered if he would risk giving her a direct order.

She wondered what she would say to him if he did.

At last he nodded, and she felt a flood of relief. “You go down there,” he told her, “you give your statement, you get him out. And you do your damnedest to convince him Galileo is the safest place he could be right now. Whether he says yes or no … you don’t piss around down there, Chief. You deal with the immediate situation, and you haul ass back here. Clear?”

“Clear, sir.”

“And I’m sending Bob down with you.”

The relief vanished. “Doctor Hastings? Why?”

“I want him to validate their postmortem results,” he told her. “And it’s a plausible excuse to have someone down there keeping an eye on you. You stay with him, you understand? Have him treat Zajec’s injuries, if it makes you feel better, but do not go anywhere without him.”

“Fine,” she agreed. “But he’s got five minutes to make it to the hangar, or I leave without him.” She turned and started to walk away.

“Elena.”

She stopped.

“This isn’t going to change what happened.”

Nothing would change what happened. Danny was dead, and that was reality, and when all of this was untangled she would have to sit down and have a good hard look at that fact. When Jake had died she had spent days cleaning up the engine room, clearing burnt debris left over from the blast, repairing what she could and writing up invoices for the parts that needed replacing. It had not brought Jake back, but it had needed doing, and when his loss finally hit her she had been able to surrender to grief without having to worry about duty.

She would do her duty for Danny as well, and see his killer come to justice.

“Five minutes,” she repeated, and headed for the hangar.

CHAPTER 8

Volhynia

I forget,” Doctor Hastings said as they glided back down toward the planet, “do you deal with this sort of thing head-on, or are you the type to swallow your feelings?”

“You know exactly what type I am,” she told him. Bob, as it happened, was one of the few people who would know for certain.

“You’ve been swallowing a lot lately.”

Not now, she thought, shoving a bubble of grief back down her throat. “Maybe I wouldn’t have to if my friends weren’t being such assholes.”

“Did it ever occur to you that he’s even worse at dealing with loss than you are?”

“Did it ever occur to you that that’s no excuse for his behavior?”

“Didn’t say it was an excuse.” Bob always spoke mildly, as if nothing he ever said was of any import. “I’m just suggesting that when someone who copes poorly makes the mistake of getting intoxicated in public, he’s not going to handle it well.”

Annoyance began to blunt grief, and she clung to the topic. “He’s a grown man,” she said. “He has a tantrum, and I’m supposed to shrug it off and forgive him?”

“It’s really that bad between you?”

“You were there,” she reminded him. “What do you think?”

Everyone had been there. Bob had been at the bar right next to her, talking with Emily Broadmoor until Greg’s yelling drew their attention. She had retorted, for all the good it did—there was no real comeback to what he had said. His outburst had crossed a line she had thought long crossed. He had hurt her, when she had thought there was no more room for hurt in her life. At least she wasn’t spending any more time trying to figure out how to forgive him.

Bob had known Greg for years; knew his father, his sister, his wife; had known his mother before she died. Duty notwithstanding, Elena knew where his loyalties lay.

“If I asked you, as a personal favor, not to close the door on him,” Bob asked, “would you do it?”

For a moment she thought quite seriously of screaming at him. Instead she bit her tongue, and took a mental step back. Underneath her irritation, her guilt, her grief, there was bone-deep exhaustion. She had not slept, she had not eaten, she had too much left to do, and none of that was the fault of the physician. “I didn’t close anything,” she said, with more civility than she felt. “But he sure as hell did.”

Novanadyr’s traffic control guided them through the atmosphere and onto the spaceport’s tarmac, keeping them hovering until they were waved into the hangar. The deck coordinator assigned them a spot right by the back door. She appreciated the placement—she always preferred to be close to the exit, even on a developed colony—but she suspected they were simply hoping that Central wouldn’t leave their representatives on the surface for long.

They took one of the public trams to the police station. Elena was aware of stares. She kept her face expressionless and her eyes forward; both of her hands gripped the railing, but she was conscious of her handgun at her hip. Next to her Bob leaned into the wind, a half smile on his face. At one point he turned to a woman standing behind them and said hello. The woman looked startled and moved away; Bob gave a low chuckle.

“We need to be efficient,” she told Bob as the tram slowed in front of the station. “Once we walk in there, the press will descend like vultures.” She hopped off, Bob at her heels.

“A proper postmortem is going to take me at least an hour,” he warned her.

“You do what you need,” she said. “If we get separated, you can go ahead and take the shuttle back up.”

“He’ll skin me alive if I do that, Chief.”

“He’ll skin me alive, too. But I’m not sticking around here if it means dealing with stringers.” If she had to choose between Greg’s anger and the full force of the press corps, she would face her captain’s rage.

His lips thinned, and he shook his head. “Stubborn,” he murmured, and she knew she’d won this one.

As they were walking up to the station’s entrance, a wide gap open to the building’s lobby, she caught sight of a man halfway up the block, slouching against the wall, eyes looking ahead at nothing, as if he were listening to a comm. He was absurdly thin, absurdly tall, and absurdly handsome.

She cursed.

“Bloody Ancher,” she said to Bob’s look. Ancher was a stringer: a professional journalist who had covered the Corps for years. He was tenacious, good-natured, and entirely without ethics. “Someone’s leaked that the dead man is a soldier.”

“Then we’d better get it done,” Bob said wearily, and opened the door.

The desk officer, a young man with disapproving eyes, checked her weapon and directed them upstairs to the main office, a wide, airy room spanning the width of the building. Behind the reception desk stood a young woman, pale and petite, like Jessica; but her hair was dark, her skin was free of freckles, and she lacked Jess’s palpable exuberance. She watched them patiently, and Elena stood back, allowing Bob to handle the social aspects. “Good afternoon,” he said to the officer. “We’re here to see Chief Stoya.”

He flashed her a smile that Elena had long ago noted many women—even as young as this one—found charming. Elena saw the pale cheeks color a little, and her dark eyes warmed. “Of course,” she replied easily, giving Elena a perfunctory glance. “I’ll let him know you’re here.” She walked off toward the private offices that lined the room’s interior walls.

One of the office doors opened, and the weary-eyed Chief Stoya emerged. In person he seemed smaller, although he was easily Elena’s height. She thought the illusion came from the way he moved, compact and efficient, threading himself between the desks with ease. He scanned the room with wary intelligence, and despite his cold expression she wondered if he would prove more flexible than she had assumed.

She did not have to wonder long. He shot her a look of open dislike, then let his gaze settle on Bob. “You are Doctor Hastings,” he said. His rigid mouth thinned. “Doctor Velikovsky is waiting for you downstairs in the morgue,” he said. “Officer Keller will escort you.”

That accent again, different from that of the locals she had heard in the city, and still vaguely familiar. He sounded like some of the traders she knew, and she wondered if he had spent time in the Fourth Sector. Cygnus, maybe, or Osaka Prime. Someplace with money.

Bob favored Keller, the young woman at the desk, with a pleased smile. “That’s very kind of you, Chief,” he said, and Elena thought his warmth was sincere.

As Keller made her way around the desk, Stoya locked his eyes on Elena. They were cold, those weary eyes; ice-blue and clear, but barren of any emotion at all.