Elizabeth Bonesteel - The Cold Between

“Oh my God, ” she breathed. “What is that? Cream, and lemon, and … hazelnut?”

“You have a discerning palate,” he told her, pleased. “I’ve also added a splash of rum, just to deepen the fruit flavor. I was worried it was a bit too much.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s perfect. Lovely. Is there more?”

So he handed her the bowl, and they wandered into the living room, and he sat next to her on the couch while she consumed his experiment. “You made this,” she said, as she ate it all, bite by bite.

He nodded. “It is my profession. I am a dessert chef.”

“My goodness, yes you are,” she said. She scraped the bottom of the bowl and looked into it sadly. “I suppose that was all,” she sighed, and he laughed.

“There are a few others at earlier stages,” he told her. “Incomplete. I experiment, a bit, on my own.”

“Have you done this long?”

“Off and on, for about thirty years,” he told her.

“Was that your profession with PSI? Did you cook for them?”

He shook his head. “I was an officer,” he told her, deciding not to elaborate. “But Fyodor—he was our captain, and for most of my life there my mentor—loved to make desserts, and on the longer journeys he would always try something he had never made before. He would have me help him. After he retired, I kept on doing it.” It had been a comfort, one thing he had been able to keep constant after everything around him had changed.

“Is that why you came here?” she asked. “To be a chef?”

He paused. “In a way,” he told her at last. “I was born here. My sister has never left. Her husband died last year, and she asked me to come back and help her run her business. She has a café, so cooking for her made sense.” He felt a strange sense of relief, and of exposure; he had not spoken of Katya to anyone since he had come back.

He waited for her to ask why he had left, why he had stayed away for so long; but it was Katya that had caught her imagination. “Are you close to her?” she asked, with something like wistfulness.

He shook his head. “She was very young when I left. I wrote to her … but I was a stranger. Now she asks that I tell no one how we are related.” It was not the whole truth, but it was enough.

“Why?”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “We are not always thought of with charity,” he told her, although he was certain she knew it. “Katya believes PSI is full of evil, selfish thieves, running from their responsibilities.” He regarded her, suddenly curious. “I’m rather surprised you do not.” He had always assumed Central Corps collaborated with PSI only grudgingly, when left with no other options. It had not occurred to him that Central, mistrust notwithstanding, might recognize the value in an alternate approach.

The woman’s eyes narrowed a little as she considered her next words. “I know what people say,” she admitted. “But I know what they say of us as well. There is truth and lie in all of it. I may be loyal to Central, but I know enough to understand why some would want nothing to do with them. And given my own choices, people choosing to live their lives and raise their families on a starship instead of a dusty bit of rock makes a lot of sense to me. Out here … you may think I’m naive, but I have seen things. I have seen people starving. I’ve seen the remains of colonies that turned to civil war when they ran out of food. And I have seen people who have survived this fate, or dodged it entirely, only because PSI intervened when we couldn’t. You are called thieves, and perhaps strictly speaking that is sometimes true,” she concluded. “But I don’t believe thievery is always wrong.”

It surprised him, her vision of his family, and he felt vaguely ashamed of his own assumptions. “I would not have expected a Central soldier to have such a subtle perception of reality,” he admitted. “I would not think you were allowed.”

She grinned, and her eyes danced. “We are not all bored idiots with guns,” she told him. “The truth is, out here we see everything. And on a ship as small as ours … we must all agree, at least on some level, about right and wrong, no matter what the regulations say. The captain follows the rules when he can, but he’s also pragmatic. If it saves lives, he orders us to do the sorts of things PSI does every day, damn Central Gov, and he doesn’t lose a moment’s sleep over it.”

“I think I like this captain of yours.”

“You might, but for one thing: he has no sweet tooth.”

“I am outraged,” Trey declared. “Or perhaps I should feel sympathy.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” she told him. “When they ship us chocolate, he lets us have his share.”

He laughed. “I must admit, you soldiers appear to be less different from us than I have thought.”

“Because of chocolate?”

“Because the pleasures of being human,” he said, “seem to appeal to us all.”

She drew up her legs and knelt on the sofa, moving closer to him. “When you said, earlier, that I would need the fuel,” she asked, “what exactly did you mean?”

He took the bowl from her hand and leaned forward to place it on the table. “I should have thought that was obvious.”

“Tell me anyway,” she whispered.

He leaned back on the couch and reached his arm around her waist. Wearing his shirt, one oversized sleeve slipping off her shoulder, her breasts peeking out from behind the buttons, she looked somehow more enticing than she had completely nude. “I should like to make love to you,” he told her, drawing her closer, his free hand finding her breast and hefting it gently. “Here, on the sofa. Or the floor, if you prefer, although my preference would be first one, and then the other.” She had crawled into his lap, and he kissed her once, gently, tasting cream and hazelnut on her lips. “I would like to continue this until the sun rises and the day reclaims us both.” He moved to kiss her neck, nuzzling the hairline behind her ear. “Do you find this suggestion agreeable?”

She responded by moving closer until they were hip to hip, and she kissed him, deep and long and satisfied, and he thought the pleasures of being human would be a fine way to pass the night.

What is the half-life of the radiation produced by the destruction of a hybrid nuclear starlight engine?

Captain Greg Foster read the message again, then turned away to look out his office window. The planet of Volhynia filled the viewport, green plains and azure seas dotted with swirls of clouds, the stars shifting behind it as Galileo paralleled its orbit. All planets looked beautiful from up here, he reflected, no matter what lurked beneath the atmosphere. One of the loveliest planets he had ever seen was Liriel, an emerald jewel in a stable, six-planet star system. But Central’s fleet had struggled to evacuate the fifteen thousand colonists before the failure of their terraforming equipment had surrendered the surface to sulfur and methane. They had lost civilians. Few, in context, but Greg knew every name. He had been decorated for his work on Liriel, but he still counted it a personal failure.

The most important lessons, his mother had taught him, are the ones that go wrong. At least whatever was wrong with Volhynia was not in its atmosphere.

He turned back and reread the question. Mathematically it was a simple problem, one every Central Corps officer was expected to be able to solve without the aid of a computer. Depending on the size of the engine, radiation from the explosion would drop to tolerable levels anywhere from three to seven years later. That was a big reason nobody ran hybrid engines anymore; beyond the efficiency gains that had been made in pure starlight tech, the risks of failure were too high. Nobody wanted to block a travel corridor for such a long period of time, never mind irradiate a habitable planet. The hybrid design was inherently unstable, and nobody had been sorry to see it abandoned.