The Cold Between. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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       CHAPTER 7

      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, СКАЧАТЬ