Elizabeth Bonesteel - The Cold Between

Jessica did not understand it at all. For months Elena had seemed to recognize, on some level, that Foster needed to keep away from her, and had tried to give him space; and then everything had blown up a few weeks ago in the pub. Jessica did not believe he had really meant the things he had said, but she knew how Elena held a grudge. He was going to be a long time rebuilding that bridge, if he could do it at all, and she did not think having to break the news of Danny’s death had eased any tension.

“Did Commander Valentis say anything useful?” she asked him.

She had seen the look on his face when he had left with Valentis. Five months ago Foster had handed her the first of Commander Valentis’s reports to Shadow Ops, with a carefully worded request for her to see what she could make of the parts that had been redacted. Without explicit authorization to decrypt, she had simply documented the algorithms, and how long it might take a competent hacker to break them.

When he had shown up with the next report, she had asked why he was confiding in her, and not Commander Broadmoor, his security head. “Because you’re more loyal to me than to the rules,” he had told her.

She had never been sure what to make of that, but she couldn’t disagree.

He unfolded his long legs under the table and crossed them at the ankles. “Not so you’d notice,” he replied. “Double-talk about Lancaster and the Demeter crew, and how it’s all just a coincidence it happened on this cargo drop.”

“You believe him?”

To her surprise, he paused. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

On top of everything else, she found herself hit with a wave of unease. “You think his story is credible.”

“I think,” Foster said slowly, “that ‘credible’ and ‘true’ are not the same thing.” He looked over at her, and she saw a familiar sharpness in his eyes. “How comfortable would you be digging into the life of a dead man?”

The breach of privacy should have horrified her, but it was action, and it might actually prove useful. “Parameters, sir?” she asked.

“No parameters, Lieutenant. I want everything.”

“What if I run into something locked?”

“We’ll clear it after the fact.”

She held his gaze for a moment. “Locked” could mean tagged as private, or it could mean classified and sealed under threat of court-martial. She wondered briefly if her captain was testing her. Greg Foster got creative with regulations sometimes—she had heard him interpret orders with impressive semantic gymnastics—but there were lines he just didn’t cross. It occurred to her to ask him if he understood what he was suggesting. She had learned over the years, though, that he missed almost nothing. He knew exactly what he was asking her to do, and how good she would have to be to do it.

This was more than circumventing regulations. This was working around the Admiralty, around Shadow Ops, around Central Gov itself. Regardless of her intentions, she could be charged with treason. There was something bigger happening, something he had not told her yet—and he didn’t trust his own command chain to handle it. That he trusted her was both flattering and daunting, and she had no intention of letting him down.

“She spent the night with someone, didn’t she?”

It took her a moment to recognize the change of subject, and she grew immediately wary. Like every practical, pragmatic man, he had a blind spot, and his had been the same as long as she had known him. “Why do you ask?”

She knew he had heard her bristle. He always heard it when she bristled. “This guy—do you think they’re at a point where she’d lean on him? No matter what she thinks she needs, at some point being alone is not going to work.”

Oh, hell, he thought it was someone on board. “It wasn’t one of ours, sir,” she told him. “He was a stranger. Some guy she met at the bar.”

“That doesn’t sound like her.”

“You think I’m making it up?”

“Of course not. I just—you know her as well as I do. You’re telling me you’re not surprised?”

She thought back. She had been pleasantly tipsy when Elena had left the group, but she remembered the pirate, how he had leaned toward her friend and smiled, how Elena had laughed, her whole body relaxing for the first time all night. “Not with this guy,” she told him. “He was tall, dark, and handsome, and looked like he’d had his nose broken a half-dozen times and didn’t care about getting it fixed. He even wore the uniform, which seemed a little weird at a local pub, but it looked good on him.”

“Uniform? You said he wasn’t one of ours.”

Oops. “No, sir. He was PSI.”

Foster became utterly still, and for one disconcerting moment she could not read his expression at all. “Are you certain of that, Lieutenant?”

All of her alarm bells were going off. “Certain? No. He was wearing all black, and he had his hair pulled back in a braid, like they do. Of course, he was friendly, at least with her, so maybe he was just playing the part.” Jessica thought of her friend—tall, dark, and lovely—and did not wonder that anyone, even a PSI soldier, would warm to her. “What is it about PSI, sir?”

“We don’t know anything about them,” he tried. “We don’t know why this man was there. None of our intelligence suggests they do shore leave like we do. What could he want on Volhynia, then?”

She took in the anxiety on his face. She was beginning to think this wasn’t about jealousy after all. “Don’t bullshit me, sir. I know you. You don’t get paranoid about PSI. Hell, you’re not shy about working with them when we need them.”

“That’s in the Fourth Sector. I don’t know them here.”

“But they’re on our side, sir. Aren’t they?”

He was silent for a long time, and her spine began to tingle again. PSI was an acronym pulled from a dead language, which roughly translated meant freedom, truth, intellect. In her experience, they lived up to the sentiment. Like many people who had grown up on a world with limited resources, she viewed PSI as a positive force, sometimes heroic. PSI supply drops had kept her warm and properly fed as a child. It had never occurred to her before that she knew nothing of them at all.

“It’s more than just Danny,” she said quietly, “isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you can’t tell me.”

“No.”

She took a moment to silently curse rank and regulations, then nodded. “I’ll get on Danny’s records, sir,” she said formally. There was little she could do for Danny, but she could do this.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. And as soon as I can—” He was interrupted by a chime from his comm. “Yes?”

Jessica heard nothing; he had it set to private audio, the patch behind his ear flashing dimly as he listened, but by his lack of response she knew the message was not from a person, but from Galileo herself. She saw the color drain from his face, and his eyes grew hard and determined. Before he was finished listening, he was on his feet. She stood as well, and wished she hadn’t; the difference in their heights seemed less dramatic when she was sitting down. “Sir?” she asked.

“They’ve released the killer’s name,” he told her tersely. “I need to talk to the chief.”

Elena sat on the floor between her bed and the window, staring out at the stars. She could so easily imagine being out there in the icy darkness, weightless, airless, soundless. Sometimes as she watched she held her breath; but she could still hear her heartbeat, and under that the soft, constant thrum of Galileo ’s systems. The ship made a different sound when they were in the FTL field at speed, but even at rest it sang, gentle as a lullaby. That song always made Elena think of Jake, and for a long time it had left her sad; but in recent months, despite her battles with Greg, it had made her feel strong, and less alone. Even after she broke up with Danny. Especially after.