Elizabeth Bonesteel - The Cold Between

She tried to feel grief, but all of her rage, all of the intensity that should have been about Danny was focused on Greg. Why had he brought them here? He hated tourist planets. She had wondered about his mother, about being close to the wormhole and the site of the Phoenix accident; but the man she knew wouldn’t have kept tired troops out another three solid weeks just to get three billion kilometers away from where a starship had been blown to pieces twenty-five years ago. There was something else happening; she had seen it in him. Only there was no way for her to ask him, this man who had become a stranger to her, what was really going on.

The anger was childish and pointless. She was stupid. And more than anything, she wished for the Greg she had known six months ago, who would have sat here, as he had after Jake died, asking nothing of her, just staring with her out at the stars.

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?”