Читать книгу The Cold Between - Elizabeth Bonesteel - Страница 14

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.

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?”

“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.