Price of Silence

by Ross, Deborah J.

  The Price of Silence

  Deborah J. Ross

  Book View Café Edition

  April 3, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-161-0

  Copyright © 2012 Deborah J. Ross

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  The Price of Silence

  Because he had joined the crew at the last minute and because he was still very young, Devlin felt awkward, not quite accustomed to no longer having a last name, but being only “Devlin of Juno.” During the last stretch of space flight to the planet December, he explored the various work areas, practicing maneuvering in zero-gee, until he found Shizuko, Juno’s engineer, and Verity, the pilot, in the galley. The room was roughly spherical, the walls studded with storage bins.

  Heads close together, knees hooked around stabilization bars, the two women were sipping bulbs of what looked like real coffee. Spirals of plum blossoms covered Shizuko’s micropore skins from one arm to the opposite shoulder, leaving the rest of her slender body shimmering silver. Verity’s thunderbolts jagged across a field of palest yellow. Despite his medical training, Devlin’s pulse rate jumped. The skins clung almost as closely as the real thing, revealing every line of muscle and bone, breasts round and soft without the pull of gravity.

  “Ohé, Devlin!” Shizuko beckoned him to join them. “Hungry?”

  Devlin fitted himself into the frame, banging his knees and one elbow in the process. The natural tone of his postural muscles kept his body pressed against the bars, holding him in place.

  Verity smothered a smile and handed Devlin two bulb containers and a flat packet. He bit off the tip of one, expecting the standard reconstitute paste. Instead, the mixture was subtly spiced, with a lingering warmth of ginger. He chewed the accompanying bread, fluffy dough layered with potato and garbanzo filling. The second dish was a spirulina pudding that looked like pale green gelatin but tasted of limes.

  “This is good!”

  “Araceli’s cooking.” Unlike the other crew, Verity didn’t shave her head, but braided her black hair in scalp-hugging spirals. With her milky skin, he thought her beautiful but hard-edged.

  A shadow shifted at the edge of Devlin’s vision. Archaimbault March floated at the entrance, like a silent panther in his jumpsuit of unallayed black. Archaimbault March, like Devlin, had joined Juno at TerraBase, neither passenger nor crew, his mission as well as his military rank never stated. Devlin assumed he was a high-ranking security officer; with his restless gaze and opaque expression, the man reeked of covert power.

  “Was there something you wanted?” Shizuko said.

  “Your captain tells me you are investigating the lack of communication with the December authorities.”

  “That’s true,” she replied, without a hint of defensiveness. “But it’s not unexpected, given the recent stellar flares. We’re still on the other side of the sun from the planet.”

  December was a Stage Three planet, with a breathable atmosphere and generous supplies of water. Its five principal continents hosted pristine forests, plains, and deserts, all abundant in compatible biology. It had been colonized and then abandoned ten thousand years ago by an alien race whose enigmatic ruins dotted the temperate zones.

  The planet had passed the rigorous process of robotic exploration, followed by years of painstaking Stage Two survey. The first wave of colonists had been there for more than a decade local time, enough to establish a viable agricultural community. Sometimes dangerous conditions didn’t show up right away, but planets usually didn’t make it this far in the colonization process without some indication of trouble.

  “I will run diagnostics on our own equipment to make sure the problem isn’t reception,” Shizuko added.

  From the faint tightening around Archaimbault March’s eyes, he doubted her reassurance. “Very well. Inform me as soon as you obtain any results.”

  “You’ll be the second to know,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. Then added, “After Fidelio.”

  Once Archaimbault March had left, Devlin muttered, “He’s sure got a comet stuck up his ass.”

  “I don’t trust him, either,” Shizuko said. “Why would TerraBase dispatch someone like him to an agricultural colony?”

  Verity looked at Devlin slantwise. “Do all military personnel set you off, or just this particular idiot?”

  “Anything in a uniform. It’s a good thing you — we — don’t wear them.”

  Shizuko laughed in such a friendly way that Devlin relaxed. “Oh, Devlin, you’re not what we expected.” Her lips drew together like softly rounded petals. Devlin wondered what it would be like to kiss her.

  “What did you expect, that I’m not it?”

  Shizuko tilted her head, a gesture that substituted for a shrug. “We’re used to being a world unto ourselves. Dirtsiders brush past us like mayflies. But we’re out of balance now. You know that Aimer jumped ship at our last TerraBase refit?”

  “He was your previous physician, wasn’t he?” Devlin said.

  “He was one of us.”

  Us. And with that subtly accented word came the hint, the possibility of an invitation.

  In all the years since the Fosterage agent had found him in the slums of D’al-Jarkata, Devlin had never considered the possibility of belonging to another family.

  Cautiously, the crew was opening to him, as if he touched some need within them. It wasn’t his medical expertise. Verity had para-med training and the emergency cryo served for anything serious. They didn’t have to recruit another physician. But they had, and hoped.

  Behind Shizuko’s dark eyes, he sensed the question, Are you the one?

  “Well, back to work.” Shizuko gathered up the containers, slid them into the recycling slot, and glided from the room.

  For a long moment, Verity stared at the door. Her brows drew together, furrowing her pale skin. Even with the odd body language of zero-gee, Devlin sensed she was gathering herself.

  “There’s something I want you to understand,” she said, “about the way Shizuko is with people, about how we all are. To begin with, Rhea and I were lovers our first year in Academy. Then she connected with Fidelio—”

  She was talking too fast, her gaze everywhere but at him, her voice resonant with something strong and hot. “You think he’s gorgeous now, you should have seen him then, with something to prove! He and Aimer had been buddies, then TerraBase assigned us Araceli as quartermaster at the last minute. Maybe they thought he was weird enough to handle us, I don’t know. Our first flight, we did a lot of... um, accommodating each other. I don’t sleep with men and that was all right. Fidelio pretends he’s after everyone’s ass, but he isn’t. He’s actually a very private person that way.”

  “Oh.” Warmth prickled the back of Devlin’s neck.

  “Anyway, one day between missions, Fidelio came home with Shizuko. We needed an engineer. The one originally assigned to us didn’t work out. It was as if —” her voice dropped in pitch, “— as if we’d all been waiting for her, as if she filled some place in our lives we hadn’t even known was empty. She brought us together, catalyzed us into something more than our individual selves. Aimer left an absence. If Shizuko thinks you —” Verity stopped abruptly, her mouth tensing.

  She looked at him, direct and hard. Devlin had seen people killed for less. “If you hurt Shizuko, I’ll kill you.”

  “I would never —”

  “Nuts to your intentions.”

  Devlin touched the back of her hand with his fingertips. The gesture shifted the energy between them, as he’d meant to. “You do care. That’s what this conversation is about, isn’t it? It’s why you made sure I knew how much you love Shizuko and that you aren’t interested in me sexually.”

  “It’s possible,” Veri
ty said, without lowering her eyes. Then she pushed herself free, through the portal.

  A jumble of feelings surged up in Devlin. Three slow breaths, counting heartbeats, gave him the necessary calm to sort them through. Some he knew, the aching loneliness, the longing for intimacy. Others he couldn’t put his finger on, even with the meditation-enforced stillness. He only knew that if he gave way to them, he would be swept away, never the same again.

  o0o

  Moving with assuredness, Devlin paused at the entrance to the bridge. The approach to December had given him plenty of practice in zero-gee, although he would never achieve the balletic grace of the space crew. Red-haired Rhea, her micropores glimmering in shades of metallic green, looked up from the array of camera readouts, visible spectra, infrared.

  “Ohé, Devlin.”

  Devlin settled beside Shizuko. Pleasure tingled through his body as he noticed the long graceful lines of her neck, her tapering fingers, the pale pink blossoms of her micropore skins.

  “Approaching direct line of range,” Verity said crisply. Her hair, now freed from its tight braids, fanned out from her face like a halo of spun black glass. She, like Shizuko, seemed beautiful at that moment; how easy it would be to love her, to love them all.

  “Still no contact?” said Fidelio. He was, Devlin admitted, an extraordinarily beautiful man, with a fine-boned, supple strength, a frosting of silver-gilt hair, and gleaming platinum micropores.

  “I’ve been hailing them on all the standard emergency frequencies,” Verity answered. “I get nothing from either the station or dirtside, just background static.”

  Shizuko muttered, mostly to herself, “Where are they?”

  None of them clung to the hope that the problem might lie in Juno’s receivers.

  “We’re getting data now.” Shizuko frowned. “There’s a planet there, but it can’t be December. Not with that albedo.”

  “I’ve got preliminary spectroscopic analysis of atmospheric content.” Rhea cleared her throat. “Captain, these... they’re all wrong.”

  Captain? Devlin remembered Fidelio saying that no one onboard called him anything but his name. “Nothing matches!” Rhea continued. “I’m reading water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, all right, but way too much monoxide... methane... . sulfuric compounds.”

  Devlin held his breath as images appeared on the screens, compiled and enhanced by the computers. He’d expected to see a planet very like Terra, vast blue oceans and a tracery of white over the tan and dark green outlines of land masses. Instead, swirling brown and yellow clouds obliterated any traces of the surface. The entire planet seemed to glow, to pulsate with the atmospheric turbulence.

  “What the hell happened down there?” Shizuko’s voice sounded husky, breathless. “A cometary strike?” December’s system had a particularly rich Oort cloud.

  The bridge fell silent for a moment before Fidelio said, “Deploy probes. Set the data feedback at maximum capture rate.”

  “Probes calibrated,” Verity said. “Calculating optimal trajectory. Launching now.”

  Devlin’s screen showed the elongated teardrop shape of the probes, chemical rockets firing on a curved path down to the planet. They shrank to pinpoint size and then disappeared.

  No one now expected to hear from the planetside colony. Hours passed as the probes sped toward their target. Everyone was trying to keep busy, to not think about what lay ahead. About the December colonists.

  o0o

  When the first data from the probes began coming in, Devlin rushed to the bridge. Archaimbault March was already there, a black-clad shadow, eyes restless.

  “The probes have penetrated the lower atmospheric strata,” said Verity.

  “Anything visual yet?” Fidelio said. “Radar scans?”

  “Hold on.”

  Grainy images revealed lightning flashes through the torrential rains. Winds battered the probe, blotting out images from the visible-spectrum lenses.

  “Surface infrared coming in.” Rhea rattled off a stream of technical phrases Devlin didn’t understand. “Carbon dioxide with significant particulate fractions of carbon and aerosolized sulfuric acid.”

  “And the temperature?”

  She looked up, hazel eyes glassy. “250 degrees.”

  Celsius, Devlin reminded himself. That’s close to five hundred Fahrenheit. It wasn’t hot enough to melt rock, but nothing living could survive. Water could not exist in liquid form at that temperature, only in the upper atmosphere. Rain from those storms would turn to steam, then shoot upwards in immense geysers, only to liquefy at the cooler altitudes.

  Devlin thought of primitive Terra, artist’s renditions based on scientific speculation. Its eternal gloom had been broken by lightning storms and the lurid red of molten lava, crawling across an ever-shifting landscape.

  “Fidelio, this is very strange.” Shizuko flicked the readout screens to display a color-enhanced thermal pattern. A line of fiery red pinpoints ran through the center of the continent.

  “Overlay!” Fidelio said.

  A topographic grid appeared over the thermal readout.

  Shizuko’s fingers danced over the computer touchpads. “Looks like five, six hundred volcanic peaks. That many again on the Continent South Two. And that’s only the big ones.”

  “How could this happen?” Rhea sounded dazed. “On Terra and half a dozen other planets, we have records of maybe three or four adjacent volcanoes going active. Never an entire mountain range. It doesn’t make sense. Each new eruption would progressively reduce the overall seismic stress —”

  “What else?” Verity snapped. “Some idiot laying down a line of superbombs? Even if the colonists could do it, it wouldn’t produce what’s down there.”

  “Nor would any weapon in the human arsenal,” Fidelio said, his gaze flickering to the security officer. “Isn’t that right?”

  Devlin turned to stare. Archaimbault March’s features were as impassive as ever, but his skin had gone chalky. The man might hold himself rigid, might clamp down on any expression of horror, but his body betrayed him. Whatever his mission, whatever he had hoped — or feared — to find on December now lay beyond his reach, and in its place a literal hell.

  Devlin sensed, tasted, a shift in the atmosphere of the bridge. Shizuko, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears, glanced from Verity to Fidelio. The captain’s jaw muscles clenched, hard against the clean, elegant lines of bone.

  Words echoed in Devlin’s mind. No weapon in the human arsenal...

  Sweet heaven, what had the December colonists stumbled across, on a planet studded with alien ruins?

  In an almost inhumanly cool voice Fidelio said, “We are going to assume that whatever is going on down there is of natural origin.”

  “How many people were in the colony?” Devlin asked, dry-mouthed.

  “Between four and five thousand,” said Fidelio.

  Shizuko covered her face with her hands.

  A vision flickered behind Devlin’s eyes, the twisted, shriveled corpses of children baking in that oven heat, of scattered groups of survivors huddled in the far reaches of caverns, praying for help that never came, suffocating...

  Suffocating in the night...

  Memories rose up in the darkness of Devlin’s mind — the smothering heat, the cries that tore their way through ragged flesh, the stench of sulfur or was it burning tires? Terror molten in his veins, every muscle strung to the breaking point, the pressure of his heart leaping in his throat...

  Devlin closed his eyes for a moment and focused on the center of his body, deep in his belly. Drawing his breath into the point, he imagined it cooling and cleansing everything it touched. The smells and cries receded into the safety of the past. His stomach unclenched.

  “. . . commit these departed souls to Thy care...” Fidelio murmured.

  For a long moment — a breath, a heartbeat — no one said anything.

  “Let’s get to work.” Fidelio broke the silence. “Rhea, keep the probe going as lo
ng as you can. I want every scrap of data funneled into a climatology analysis. If there’s any chance that,” with a minute tilt of his head toward December, true direction, not the view screen, “is a Venusian scenario at great acceleration, we’d better find out everything we can.

  “Meanwhile, let’s see what the station computers can tell us. Verity, you and Shizuko take Devlin over in the shuttle.” His voice roughened for an instant. “I don’t want anyone taking chances out there.”

  Fidelio’s gaze flickered to Devlin. “If, by heaven’s grace, there are any survivors on the station...”

  “Captain.” Archaimbault March had been so silent before, his words, although spoken softly, split the air like the crack of a whip. “As of now, I’m taking over this investigation.”

  Fidelio stared at him. “You have no authority —”

  “Don’t force me to relieve you of command. I can and will do so if you refuse to cooperate.” Archaimbault March hesitated, shock still edging his voice. “I believe... it would be best to work together.”

  Fidelio’s eyes hardened. “This is my ship, run by my crew. As long as we are in space, I give the orders. If you don’t like it, get out and walk.”

  “With all due respect, you have no idea what you’re sending your people into.”

  “Do you?”

  Archaimbault March paused, but only for a moment. “Point taken. But if there is any record whatsoever of what and how that came about —” His chin jerked minutely toward the screen displaying the images, the tortured, lightning-laced landscape. “Captain, can I put this any plainer? My training is the best chance any of us have of solving this terrible mystery.”

  “In that case,” Fidelio said, “you have permission to observe.” Archaimbault March’s features shifted, a flicker of triumph. “From the bridge.”

  The man in black went still, and Devlin thought of a panther, eyes focused on its prey, but then he dipped his head.

  He’s biding his time.

  Devlin went cold inside.

  o0o

  Sometimes, during his sleeping periods, Devlin lay in the dark in his webbing, ears straining for the faint, almost inaudible sounds of the ship. Always there was silence. Vast, impenetrable, unyielding silence. Once or twice, he imagined what he would do if this silent dark never ended, if in his sleep the crew disappeared, Shizuko, Fidelio, the others, dead or gone, the ship speeding through the void, and he trapped here, alone except for the beating of his own heart.