Price of Silence

by Ross, Deborah J.

  Her eyes were closed, her facial muscles soft. Her parted lips held none of her usual tension, the ready answers, the quick retorts. In a moment of stark clarity, he noticed the delicacy of the skin around her eyes, the faint dark smudges as if she had, as a child, cried herself to sleep, and even now her body retained the memory. She would be furious if he ever made such an observation aloud to her.

  “Verity...” he whispered in his mind. “Be alive.”

  As if in answer to his plea, a mist appeared on the inner surface of the visor in front of her mouth. It was so faint that for a moment, he wasn’t sure he had actually seen it, or only wanted it to be true. It was gone in a moment, absorbed by the air circulating system of the suit.

  The stars spun by in a disorienting pattern. No, it was he who was spinning. Then he saw how far away they were from the ship.

  His radio cleared suddenly and he heard Fidelio’s voice, hailing.

  “I’ve got her, I’ve got her!”

  “Hold tight,” said Fidelio. “We’re on our way.”

  The station came into view, slowly rising in his visual field like a massive, metal-white sun. The oxygen-fueled flames at the airlock were almost gone, but new blazes had broken out the entire length. The interior must be an inferno, the splintered bones with their shreds of leathery flesh, the fused radio console, all gone.

  Devlin managed to engage his positioning jets again, a short burst that sent the ship spinning away visually in a different plane. He cursed, fumbled, and tried the opposite direction.

  Then he saw that something had detached itself from Juno and appeared to be headed his way. It wasn’t a shuttle but a frame lorry, that slow old workhorse meant for lunar landings and hauling. Some TerraBase budgeteer had decided the lorry could also serve as a shuttle backup. Its only advantage was that at the moment it was already outside the ship, far faster to launch than the second shuttle.

  The lorry matched Devlin’s speed and direction. Because he was spinning and it wasn’t, it came around again and again in Devlin’s visual field. He thought of an old-fashioned carousel and wondered where the brass ring was.

  “Devlin!” Fidelio’s voice came over his helmet radio. “Can you grab the tool arm?”

  Devlin noticed a projection from the front of the lorry. He was holding tight to Verity with one hand. If he stretched out the other...

  His fingers missed the tool arm by a good meter.

  The lorry inched closer. Each revolution brought Devlin’s hand closer to the tool arm. The smoothness of the maneuver astonished him. The thing must weigh tons, built for heavy extravehicular work, and yet it glided closer, centimeter by painstaking centimeter.

  The lorry came around one more time. The tool arm smacked into the palm of Devlin’s gloved hand. His fingers curled around it. He tightened his grip on Verity. A sudden sensation of weight jerked at his shoulder. Then the stars stopped moving.

  Devlin wanted to laugh and cry all at once. Not even space rapture could be this delicious. Arm over arm, terrified of letting go, he worked his way to the lorry’s cockpit. The platinum-shaded-bronze of Fidelio’s space suit glinted at him. It was all he could do not to wrap the other man in a hug.

  Devlin clambered through the lorry’s rollbars. He pushed Verity into the seat behind Fidelio and pulled the safety harness over her head, anchoring it between her legs and snug around her chest.

  The lorry swung around, heading back toward the station. The starfields looked so deep, so endless. Like death itself.

  “Breath shallowly,” Fidelio said. “It’ll help.”

  “Shizuko.” Devlin wasn’t sure if he’d said the name aloud, or heard it as a cry in the back of his mind. He had seen Verity as dead, called her name, and found her.

  He told himself she could still be alive. Out there. Somewhere. The space suits were tough. Even if she’d been caught in the blaze, she could have survived. Or perhaps the first explosion had thrown her free and she was waiting for them to come for her. She’d been behind him...

  An image flared up in his mind, Shizuko whirling, bracing herself against the airlock wall, one hand on the frame.

  She stayed behind... carrying the computer core... with an engineer’s knowledge of ship systems...

  Fidelio brought them around, back towards the station. The planet hung above them like a dirt-smudged ball. Debris floated everywhere, pieces of ceramometal, hull casings, wires, crystalline silicon, the twisted wreckage of their shuttle. A jagged hole gaped where the airlock had been. The blaze was almost out, its oxygen exhausted.

  Fires still raged through the central section, spewed out by the winds of decompression. As Devlin watched, slowly comprehending, the area where the solid rocket fuel was stored came into view.

  Fidelio slammed the lorry’s braking jets, reversed direction in a gyrojockey’s record time, and shoved it into maximum thrust. The lorry’s engine vibrated soundlessly with the strain. Devlin felt it through his bones.

  Another flash of white erupted behind them like a miniature sun, this one more brilliant and piercing than the first. For a long moment, the station shimmered in Devlin’s vision like an orb of silvery gray. Then Devlin’s vision cleared and he realized the ghostly shape was only a retinal after-image.

  Shards of what had been the massive space station glittered like metallic confetti against the velvet black. Devlin blinked, and saw the debris was hurling outward in all directions.

  Devlin felt as if he too were flying apart, like the station, little bits in all directions. He mustn’t start thinking about Shizuko.

  There was no ping! as the first shards ricocheted off the lorry’s rollbars. Devlin saw rather than heard the impact. Fidelio muttered unintelligible curses under his breath. The lorry, never intended for speed, labored on.

  Juno’s airlock gaped before them. Fidelio brought the lorry in at full speed. Someone — Rhea would be in command — had deployed the brake nets. They skidded across the landing surface, then plowed into the first net. The cords tightened and stretched, damping momentum. Then everything jolted to a stop. Devlin saw it coming and braced himself. His neck muscles tightened automatically. The suit gave him a blessed measure of support. The second net sprang into place as the lorry rebounded.

  The outer hatches of the airlock slid closed. Lights marked the pressurization cycle.

  Fidelio unclipped his harness and swung around to secure the tie-downs for the lorry. Devlin fumbled with his own straps. His hands seemed to belong to someone else, but he managed to get everything loose, even Verity’s safety harness. Fidelio caught her other arm and propelled the three of them into the inner airlock.

  The anonymous gray walls had never seemed gloomier or more claustrophobic. Araceli met them there, a respirator in one hand and a Jarvik CPR unit, still in its case, strap looped around his other elbow.

  “Ship damage?” Fidelio said.

  “Minimal.” Araceli reached for Verity.

  “Careful!” Devlin said. “I want to x-ray her before I get her out of the suit.”

  Together with Fidelio, Araceli supported Verity, one on either arm. They guided her down the corridor, twisting in unison to change direction at corners, shifting orientation for the best, smoothest speed, kicking off walls and handholds as if they’d rehearsed the route. Devlin spun, banged elbows, but somehow kept up with them. The two men enclosed her by their presence. Neither was her lover, but until that moment Devlin had not realized how much they loved her.

  Shizuko...

  They took Verity to the medical bay. The tests came back clear for fractures or gross internal organ damage, but showing the radiolucency pattern suggestive of swollen, sprained neck ligaments. She was going to have a miserable whiplash.

  Devlin improvised a supportive collar, cutting it from foam splinting material. He slipped her helmet off, stabilized her neck and slipped on the collar. Her carotid pulses felt strong and steady under his fingers.

  With Araceli’s help, he eased Verity out of her s
uit and anchored her to the gurney. She moaned and opened her eyes.

  “What the hell?” were her first words.

  Araceli, floating beside her head, said, “She’s all right.”

  “Any pain?” Devlin said, waving the quartermaster to shut up.

  Verity rubbed her temple and tugged at the cervical collar, scowling. “Just my head. What hit me? What is this... thing around my neck?”

  Devlin wanted to laugh and cry in relief. They had lost Shizuko, the computer core, and whatever secrets it held. But at least he could count this small victory.

  o0o

  Devlin, his legs hooked around a stabilization frame, watched Verity sleep. From time to time, her eyes moved behind her closed lids. Dreaming, but of what? She moaned, a sound like the beginning of a sob deep in her throat. He touched her hand, the warm smooth skin, and she quieted. Did she know, even in her dreams, that she was safe with him? As long as he kept his focus on her, he could never wish Shizuko were lying here instead.

  A shadow hovered at the entrance to the medical bay. Even without turning his head, Devlin knew who it was. Rage flickered at the corners of his mind, curled like tentacles of smoke through his guts.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you.” The voice wove silk through the smoke. Silk like an assassin’s garotte.

  “I’m busy.”

  “Oh, surely not.” Archaimbault March propelled himself to the side of the bed, arrested his momentum with practiced ease. “You wouldn’t want the death of the engineer to be for nothing.”

  “What’s it to you?” Devlin spared no energy keeping the hostility from his voice.

  “You don’t like me, do you?”

  “You — and everything you stand for.”

  Gray eyes blinked. “I confess I find your attitude puzzling. I have done nothing to harm you. Have I? And yet, we do have a common purpose.”

  Devlin looked away, to Verity’s serene features. “We do not. I save lives. You spend them.”

  “I had nothing to do with the death of your engineer. Or the colonists and the crew on the space station. In fact, I am as anxious as you to discover the cause.”

  For a long moment, Devlin said nothing. His breath stilled in his throat. He turned his head to look at the black-clad man.

  “Was there anything?” Archaimbault March went on, his words now coming in a rush. “Anything the engineer found in the computer records? Anything that might tell us what happened to December?” He shifted, his dark form towering above Devlin. Devlin heard the harmonics of urgency ringing in his voice.

  In Devlin’s mind, pieces came together, slipping seamlessly into place. Shizuko found it.

  Slowly, he tilted his head in a spacer’s negative. “As far as we know, Captain Fidelio was right. It was a natural disaster. A cometary strike setting off widespread tectonic instability.”

  Pale lips pressed together. “That doesn’t explain the bodies on the station, or why it was sabotaged. I heard what happened with the spider wire when you were leaving.”

  “Populations such as the station crew are subject to paranoid delusions,” Devlin said, putting all the authority he had learned in medical training behind his words. “It’s a closed-feedback loop phenomenon, undoubtedly triggered by grief and isolation. As for the sabotage... survivor guilt is the most likely explanation. That’s what my official medical report will conclude.”

  Devlin closed his eyes and turned away from Archaimbault March’s instant of unguarded frustration. Whatever the black-clad man’s suspicions, he had no answers, no evidence of what he had come to find. Nor, thanks to Shizuko, would he ever.

  When Archaimbault March had left, Verity opened her eyes. Devlin, bending over her, realized she had been awake, holding herself motionless, controlling her breathing to simulate sleep, through the entire conversation.

  She gestured for him to come closer. When he did so, her breath whispered across his cheek.

  “There was no spider wire. She said that so we would get away.”

  He drew back, far enough to meet her gaze again, the layers of light and grief and understanding. “I know.”

  They must never say more, never mention what Shizuko had found, records of the device the colonists had unearthed in the alien ruins, the planet killer, a weapon so terrible that she would die, rather than see it in the hands of Archaimbault March and his kind. She would die, but she would not kill, and her last gift to them had been their lives.

  And all they had left of her was a terrible emptiness in the heart, and a terrible clenching at the back of the throat that was the price of silence.

  Copyright & Credits

  The Price of Silence

  A Science Fiction Novelette

  Deborah J. Ross

  Book View Café edition: 3 April 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-161-0

  Copyright © 2009 Deborah J. Ross

  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction April/May 2009

  Cover illustration: “My imagination of planet Solaris and its two stars” by ZeoBorlis Zdenek Borl, 2010, public domain.

  Cover design by Pati Nagle

  www.bookviewcafe.com

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  Sample Chapter: Jaydium

  Deborah J. Ross, writing as Deborah Wheeler

  Chapter 1

  Dust, Kithri thought as she shoved her shoulder against the door of The Thirsty Miner Tavern. The pitted duraplast jerked open, sending a drift of gray-brown powder over her boots. My whole life is turning to dust.

  Dust was everywhere on the single inhabited continent of the planet Stayman. It clung to the folds of Kithri’s dun-colored overalls and sprinkled her ragged brown curls. Sifting past the shutters or tracked in at the door, it invaded even the corners where shadows lay thick and stale.

  The Thirsty Miner gathered its fair share of dust. Other bars catered to in-system traders, the few Federation agents who cared to rub shoulders with locals or the farmers who, when they came into town at all, kept stubbornly to themselves. But this bar, small and far from the center of Port Ludlow, attracted only its regular customers, jaydium miners all.

  Look at them, Kithri thought, pausing as the door swung shut behind her. They’re already drinking up every credit they’ve made on this run.

  Old Dowdell and his two tavern buddies, identical in their rumpled miners’ overalls and grizzled faces, looked up from their usual places at the centermost table. Kithri turned her back on them and leaned her elbows on the bar. The barkeep set a mug of brew in front of her.

  A few more years, and I’ll be just like them.

  This was not strictly true. Although Kithri had come to Stayman as a homesick adolescent, she would never be anything but an outsider. One day her clear gray eyes might dull under the faint film that never seemed to leave the other miners’ eyes, and her youthful skin might dry up into a mass of crevices like theirs, but she could never change who she was — the daughter of a Federation scientist.

  Kithri might not belong to Stayman, but Stayman had left its mark on her. The heavy fabric of her overalls could not hide the long cur
ves of her thighs, or shoulders grown muscular from years of chipping jaydium. She rubbed her nose where it had once been broken and sipped the tepid brew, wishing for the hundredth time that morning there was somewhere else to go, something else to do. She could drag out her outdated astrophysics texts and pretend to study, but what would be the use?

  I’m never going to get off this miserable planet! Not to University, not to anywhere!

  “Hey, Bloodyluck!”

  “Dowdell,” she muttered without turning around, “there’s nothing you have to say that I want to hear, so stuff it.”

  “I hear Nash’s looking for a whore on his in-system route. Fix you up good, you might do.”

  Kithri took her mug and stalked over to the farthest, darkest corner. Dowdell’s raucous laugh followed her,

  “...’course we’d all expect free samples...”

  At the rate she was going, flying singlo, it would take years to save the rest of her passage off-planet. The Federation freighters came too infrequently and too much of her earnings dribbled away just to survive on this desolate hunk of rock. But if she could find someone else trained in duo — someone besides that dustbug Dowdell — all it would take would be one, maybe two good runs. She could even make another haul before the freighter took off tonight.

  Kithri leaned against the grimy ash-brick wall and closed her eyes, trying to remember Albion’s rivers and flowered fields, the clear blue sky, the billowing golden clouds. The images were fragmentary, a child’s memories, luminous and blurred. Albion itself was now a radioactive cinder.

  Lost in her daydreams, Kithri didn’t look up as the door swung open again and a man stood there, silhouetted against the glaring daylight. His off-worlder clothing — closefit pants, shirt and vest, laced boots — did little to mask the hard, lean contours of his body. Close behind him came a stunningly beautiful woman in a tailored medic’s uniform and a taller man, brassy-haired and smiling. Dowdell let out a long whistle and glanced towards the corner where Kithri sat, her eyes still closed.