“Hello? This is Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland of the U-Star Coast City. Come in, please.”
The static buzzed and popped, and he repeated his call twice, fine-tuning the channel as he did so. Nothing. He’d lost it.
“Pyat, cheteeree, tree, dva, raz…” The woman’s voice crackled suddenly, filling the room. Whatever she was speaking, it wasn’t English. Ida frowned. English was the Fleet’s official language, used for all communication. It was hard to tell with all the noise, but it almost sounded Italian.
“Can you repeat? You are very faint.” Ida turned up the volume, and then grabbed the headset in a hurry and jammed it on. The rush of static was like a slap to the face, and he quickly turned the volume down again.
“Raz, dva, tree, cheteeree, pyat…”
The woman’s voice rose and fell in the unfamiliar accent, making it impossible to tell whether she had realized Ida was on the line and was talking to him or she was in the middle of a conversation with someone else. Ida kept talking, stopping quickly as the woman spoke again, but soon he realized she couldn’t hear him. He was eavesdropping.
Words and phrases were being repeated; he could tell that much. There were pauses; then she would repeat a phrase, sometimes quite loudly, as though she was trying to make herself heard. Ida realized that he could hear only one side of the conversation, as the pauses and phrases sometimes sounded like answers to questions, the speaker’s temper rising as though whoever she was talking to didn’t understand or couldn’t hear.
Ida didn’t like it. There was something about her tone as she went on, her speech quickening and her voice becoming higher and higher. She sounded scared and angry.
But … he couldn’t turn it off, not yet. Who was she? Where was she? Was she in trouble, in danger? He tried to tune out her voice and listen for anything in the background that might provide a clue, but the channel was uniformly awful. The static was punchy, sharp. Ida watched the graph of solar activity crawl over the nearby display. If anything, that scared Ida more than the mysterious and frightened voice broadcasting, impossibly, from the depths of subspace.
But there was nothing he could do. She couldn’t hear him, and he couldn’t hear who she was talking to. He removed the headset and there was a brief second of silence before the subspace radio’s speaker clicked in, filling his cabin with the static and the voice. It echoed oddly around the hard walls of the cabin.
Ida knew he should turn if off, but a part of him wanted to keep listening. It made him feel uncomfortable, and sad, and very, very small. The universe was a big and terrible place, and she was very far away, and there was nothing he could do, even if he knew what the trouble was. He suddenly felt that his own situation—most likely the result of a clerical error—was ludicrously insignificant.
Before he lay on the bed, he checked that the message and data stream was being recorded. If he was lucky, he might be able to analyze it later and get a position on the signal. Not that that would be of any use.
Then he closed his eyes and lay with his hands behind his head. Listening, watching the purple patterns behind his eyes, wondering who she was.
8
M’ija, no tengas miedo.
Serra woke with a start. She might even have called out, she wasn’t sure, but what she was sure of was the cold dampness of the sheet and the way her heart was trying to break out of her rib cage. She sat up quickly and breathed shallow and fast in the dark. The voice again. The dreams.
She should have left the station, insisted that Lafferty—whom she outranked—stay instead. But as her pulse slowed she also knew that a psi-marine who regretted past decisions was one with a much abbreviated lifespan.
The cabin was dark, and when she glanced to her left she saw the other side of the bed was empty, the blanket drawn back and the mattress still sunken from the weight of her companion.
There was a click from the other side of the room. Serra jumped again and this time she did call out, something colorful and Spanish that made Carter chuckle as he sat at the table, his naked back to her.
“You scared the crap out of me, Charlie.” Serra sat up against the wall and readjusted the blanket around her. Damn, it was cold. The station’s faulty atmos controls were becoming a drag, fast. “What are you doing, sitting in the dark?”
The clicking sound came again. Carter sat with his forearms on the desk and he wasn’t moving, but Serra saw something bright flash in his hands. A small metal something, narrow and silver. Charlie Carter’s Fleet Medal. FOR SERVICES RENDERED.
“You okay, baby?” she said. The Fleet Medal was the highest honor available to them both, but Carter didn’t like to wear his, preferring to leave it in its fancy box back in his quarters. He’s said several times that he didn’t need to wear it all the time, only for special occasions, and there weren’t many of those on the Coast City. Besides which, there was a smaller bar, a placeholder for the medal itself, sewn onto the breast pocket of his tunic. It was less conspicuous, which Serra knew suited him just fine.
Serra had learned to stop asking, anyway. Whenever she brought it up, he changed, withdrawing into himself. She knew that if she had a Fleet Medal, she’d wear it all the time and damn well write poetry about it, but Carter’s was a different kind of medal. He’d been part of the Fleet Marine Corps Black Ops division—that much Serra knew, but little else. He shouldn’t even have told her that. The commendation on the medal was standard, deliberately and officially vague; covering their asses, Carter said whenever she asked him about it. Which was rarely.
Except he’d clearly been thinking about it again, with the arrival of Captain Cleveland. She didn’t blame him, especially not with that idiot DeJohn stirring things up.
Serra had thought Carter’s medal was locked away in the cupboard where it usually was, but he had it now, at the table, rolling it between his thick fingers. He must have started carrying it around with him.
Carter didn’t speak or move, except for the slow motion of his fingers, turning the metal bar over and over and over, the light it caught like a star glittering in the dark.
She tried again. “Can’t sleep?”
No answer. Serra drew her legs up to her chest. Her breath was now clouding in the air in front of her face.
“Wanna talk about it?”
The Fleet Medal clattered to the tabletop and Carter got up. He was wearing pants but Serra could see his torso glisten with sweat as he moved across the room toward the door. He must have been freezing.
Almost in tune with her thoughts, he flicked the environment control on the wall next to the door up a couple of notches. Above her head, Serra heard the air unit whirr into life as it began gently blowing in warm air.
She smiled, and then, unsure if he could see, patted the bed next to her.
“Come back to bed.”
Carter stopped by the door. “You know what they give out the Fleet Medal for?”
Serra pulled her legs up tighter to her chest. “For services rendered,” she said.
“‘For services rendered.’” Carter smiled. “You know what that means when you’re in Black Ops?”
“I—”
“Means you weren’t afraid to follow orders, no matter what they were. Means you weren’t afraid to get your hands dirty. Means you did things for the Fleet that nobody else could know about. Means you did things that sometimes keep you awake at night.”
Serra nodded. “You think he was Black Ops too?”
Carter sighed and walked back to the bed. The tension in the room seemed to ease a little as he sat down heavily, rocking Serra on the mattress. She reached out to him. His skin was cold but she ignored it. She was warming up and he would too, soon enough. He rubbed his chin slowly, but said nothing.
“Think he’s cooked up that story to, what, cover his involvement with something else?” she asked. “Turning his Black Ops medal into something heroic?”
“Something heroic,” said Carter. He laughed and shook his head.
&nbs
p; “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Carter nodded and slipped back into the bed, facing her. He didn’t look her in the eye, so she took his face in her hands and softly pulled his chin up. His eyes shone in the dark and she kissed him, but his lips only twitched in response.
“You’re not okay,” she said.
He smiled, but it was a sad expression. He brushed the hair from her forehead and sighed.
“Forget it,” he said. “It’s just another bad dream.”
He settled onto his pillow and pulled the blankets up to his neck and closed his eyes. Serra watched him for a while. He didn’t fall asleep, but he seemed calm, more relaxed.
She understood, or maybe understood just a little more, anyway. Carter lived with the shadow of the Black Ops cast over him; whatever it was he had done, whatever it was he had been ordered to do, it had affected him—broken him, a little—and they’d given him a goddamn medal for it. He hated the medal; really, deep down, she knew he hated the Fleet too and was looking for a way out.
And now they had Cleveland, a man with no past, with a Fleet Medal of his own, won in an epic and heroic battle that nobody had ever heard of. Here was a moment, a chance for Carter to act on his anger, his self-loathing. Cleveland was everything Carter hated about his own past.
Serra sighed, and she slid down under the covers. Maybe Carter realized that too. Maybe he’d reached a turning point. She glanced at him and saw he was now asleep, his breathing soft.
The room was warming up and she felt a little more comfortable, but as she closed her eyes she thought perhaps the shadows in the room were moving, and as she drifted off into sleep, her face twisted into a grimace of fear and her eyes moved under their lids rapidly.
Ahí estás, Carminita!
And the cabin was still and quiet and dark, and the shadows moved.
9
“My God.”
Ida raised an eyebrow at Izanami, but the medic was staring at the floor. The subspace recording from the radio looped and echoed around Ida’s cabin as the pair sat and listened.
“What?”
Izanami looked up at him, her face drawn. If she’d had any complexion to start with, he would have said she looked quite pale. But it was hard to tell. Her opalescent skin rarely changed hue. “Can’t you hear it?”
Fear. He’d heard it before, the first time, but the more he listened, again and again, the worse it sounded. “She is—was—in trouble,” said Ida. “Some kind of accident?”
Izanami listened for a moment more, and then shrugged. “Have you pinpointed the origin?”
Ida rolled on his chair to the desk. He reached out and stopped the playback; then he pulled a computer screen toward him. His fingers spread over the display as a scrolling table of data transformed into a simple vector map he’d constructed. A solar system. The solar system. Proper noun. Home.
“Near Earth, as far as I can make out. There’s a lot of data loss in the signal. Most of the information has been stripped out by the interference.”
“Interference from Shadow, I presume?”
Ida nodded. He felt Izanami peering over his shoulder at the screen.
“And near Earth? That doesn’t make sense.”
Ida tapped his index finger against the plastic frame of the computer screen.
“Not much about this does,” he said. “Subspace isn’t used for communication—it’s a banned channel, has been for, oh, years and years—”
“Banned?” Izanami’s eyes went wide. “Is this going to get you in trouble?”
Ida waved away her concern. “No one will find out. U-Stars aren’t fitted out to monitor subspace, so it’s not like anyone can listen in. Anyway, my point is: what’s the signal doing there in the first place?” He scratched his chin and regarded the silent silver box on the table. “A signal broadcast from somewhere near the Earth, using a disused, prohibited system, spoken in something other than the Fleet’s official language.”
He poked the computer display, rotating the map of the solar system, new vectors drawing themselves from several points near the schematic representation of the orbit of Earth, each line suggesting possible source coordinates.
“I wish I knew what she was saying,” said Ida. “I don’t think anyone on the station speaks Italian, and the signal sounds too poor to feed into the station computer for a translation. If King would let me near it, of course.”
“Italian?”
Ida turned and looked at Izanami. She looked confused.
“Don’t you hear the accent?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said with a shake of the head. “That’s not Italian. Russian.”
Ida’s eyes widened. “And you know that because?”
She shrugged and turned away from Ida. She walked to his bed and sat delicately on the edge. “I worked in Russia once. That’s the beginning of the recording—she’s counting down, then up, like she’s testing something.” She held a hand up before Ida could ask the obvious. “That’s as much as I can manage, sorry.”
Ida crinkled his nose. Then he spun his chair around to the computer, switching the map back to the data tables. He flicked a hand near the radio, and the playback began. On the computer screen, the table began scrolling as the audio ran, a smaller window beneath plotting another graph of the audio analysis.
“She’s talking to someone else, that much is clear. I only patched on one side of the transmission.”
“Why do you care?”
Ida stopped, hands frozen above the computer’s touch screen. He turned slowly. Around them the Russian voice crackled on. “What do you mean?”
Izanami had lain down on Ida’s bed. Well, make yourself at home, he thought.
“You don’t know who the recording is of,” she said, looking at the ceiling. “You don’t even know where it is from. If she was in an accident, she’s probably dead. And even if she is or she isn’t, if it was near Earth, the Fleet would have picked her up, because if it was some kind of distress call, or if she was reporting on something, she wouldn’t have been using subspace. She’d be on the lightspeed link. What you patched into was an echo. That would explain the quality of the signal.”
Ida didn’t know what to say. He played his tongue along his teeth, and he felt cold again. Another environmental glitch. But she was right. The signal couldn’t have been broadcast in subspace at all. What’d he’d picked up, completely by chance, was some weird echo bouncing around the hidden dimensions of the universe.
“More to the point,” she said, “weren’t you supposed to be working on something else? Your old crewmates?”
Ida blew out his cheeks. Why did he care? Izanami’s question was fair enough: the signal was a distraction, something to keep him from going slowly mad as he tried—fruitlessly, it seemed—to get answers to his own little mystery.
But the lightspeed link was a waste of time now, the interference from Shadow growing so strong as to make it almost unusable. Even if he could break through the static, all he could do was call Fleet Command again and get some Flyeye to read him the same abbreviated reports he’d already heard a dozen times now.
“Ida?”
Ida coughed and looked at Izanami. The recording had looped again. “I’m working on it.”
“Okay.”
“Yes, okay.” Ida felt a tightening in his chest. He sucked cool air over his teeth and changed the subject. “An echo, you think?”
Izanami shrugged. “Could be?”
Ida frowned. He’d never heard of signal leakage from one dimension to another, but it sounded feasible, especially when there was a strange star just next door pulling all kind of tricks on the communications networks.
But Izanami’s question scratched at something in his mind. He repeated it over and over to himself, looped like the recording.
Why do you care, Captain Cleveland?
“Hmm,” he said at length. He turned his chair around a few degrees and looked at the radio set and computer screen on his desk. She w
as right, it was a pointless exercise. But …
“Distractions can be useful sometimes,” he said, turning back to the medic.
She nodded, and her smile reappeared. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty.”
Ida laughed, but maybe that’s what the feeling was. He tried a smile, and found it worked a little. “And, you know, there’s something about her voice … it makes me feel … sad. But in a good way, somehow. I don’t know. That doesn’t make much sense.”
Izanami tilted her head, her frown a thoughtful expression. “Melancholy can be good for the soul.”
Ida blinked. “So says the neurotherapist.”
They looked at each other, then both laughed. Izanami closed her eyes and pointed at the ceiling as she lay on the bed.
“Play it again.”
Ida pushed his screen away, waved at the radio, and sat back with his eyes closed as the Russian woman’s voice faded into the cabin.
“Pyat, cheteeree, tree, dva, raz…”
10
After another replay or two, Izanami left Ida to it. It was very late, and Ida wanted to use the main comms deck on the bridge to start a translation running before he tracked down Carter and got the marine to sign off on the next demolition briefing. And boy, was he looking forward to that meeting; he’d delayed it as long as he could, but the paperwork had to be done eventually. Over the last few cycles, Ida had realized his official duties took up maybe an hour per cycle, which made it easy to let them slide altogether. The marines resented having him poking around, giving them small, annoying extra tasks in order to get the demolition signed off. And the provost marshal, despite his apparent love of procedure, hadn’t asked to see any completed documentation yet anyway.
Ida shifted on the bed and lay awake for a few minutes, then absently turned the recording loop back on and listened to it as he lay in the dark.
He dozed and dreamed of the farm, Astrid leading him into the red barn. When they got to the door, red paint streaming off in it a breeze that was colder than it should have been in summer, he discovered it led to a corridor of the Coast City.
The Burning Dark Page 8