The Cold Between. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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СКАЧАТЬ she asks that I tell no one how we are related.” It was not the whole truth, but it was enough.

      “Why?”

      He raised his eyebrows at her. “We are not always thought of with charity,” he told her, although he was certain she knew it. “Katya believes PSI is full of evil, selfish thieves, running from their responsibilities.” He regarded her, suddenly curious. “I’m rather surprised you do not.” He had always assumed Central Corps collaborated with PSI only grudgingly, when left with no other options. It had not occurred to him that Central, mistrust notwithstanding, might recognize the value in an alternate approach.

      The woman’s eyes narrowed a little as she considered her next words. “I know what people say,” she admitted. “But I know what they say of us as well. There is truth and lie in all of it. I may be loyal to Central, but I know enough to understand why some would want nothing to do with them. And given my own choices, people choosing to live their lives and raise their families on a starship instead of a dusty bit of rock makes a lot of sense to me. Out here … you may think I’m naive, but I have seen things. I have seen people starving. I’ve seen the remains of colonies that turned to civil war when they ran out of food. And I have seen people who have survived this fate, or dodged it entirely, only because PSI intervened when we couldn’t. You are called thieves, and perhaps strictly speaking that is sometimes true,” she concluded. “But I don’t believe thievery is always wrong.”

      It surprised him, her vision of his family, and he felt vaguely ashamed of his own assumptions. “I would not have expected a Central soldier to have such a subtle perception of reality,” he admitted. “I would not think you were allowed.”

      She grinned, and her eyes danced. “We are not all bored idiots with guns,” she told him. “The truth is, out here we see everything. And on a ship as small as ours … we must all agree, at least on some level, about right and wrong, no matter what the regulations say. The captain follows the rules when he can, but he’s also pragmatic. If it saves lives, he orders us to do the sorts of things PSI does every day, damn Central Gov, and he doesn’t lose a moment’s sleep over it.”

      “I think I like this captain of yours.”

      “You might, but for one thing: he has no sweet tooth.”

      “I am outraged,” Trey declared. “Or perhaps I should feel sympathy.”

      “I think it’s wonderful,” she told him. “When they ship us chocolate, he lets us have his share.”

      He laughed. “I must admit, you soldiers appear to be less different from us than I have thought.”

      “Because of chocolate?”

      “Because the pleasures of being human,” he said, “seem to appeal to us all.”

      She drew up her legs and knelt on the sofa, moving closer to him. “When you said, earlier, that I would need the fuel,” she asked, “what exactly did you mean?”

      He took the bowl from her hand and leaned forward to place it on the table. “I should have thought that was obvious.”

      “Tell me anyway,” she whispered.

      He leaned back on the couch and reached his arm around her waist. Wearing his shirt, one oversized sleeve slipping off her shoulder, her breasts peeking out from behind the buttons, she looked somehow more enticing than she had completely nude. “I should like to make love to you,” he told her, drawing her closer, his free hand finding her breast and hefting it gently. “Here, on the sofa. Or the floor, if you prefer, although my preference would be first one, and then the other.” She had crawled into his lap, and he kissed her once, gently, tasting cream and hazelnut on her lips. “I would like to continue this until the sun rises and the day reclaims us both.” He moved to kiss her neck, nuzzling the hairline behind her ear. “Do you find this suggestion agreeable?”

      She responded by moving closer until they were hip to hip, and she kissed him, deep and long and satisfied, and he thought the pleasures of being human would be a fine way to pass the night.

       CHAPTER 3

       Galileo

       What is the half-life of the radiation produced by the destruction of a hybrid nuclear starlight engine?

      Captain Greg Foster read the message again, then turned away to look out his office window. The planet of Volhynia filled the viewport, green plains and azure seas dotted with swirls of clouds, the stars shifting behind it as Galileo paralleled its orbit. All planets looked beautiful from up here, he reflected, no matter what lurked beneath the atmosphere. One of the loveliest planets he had ever seen was Liriel, an emerald jewel in a stable, six-planet star system. But Central’s fleet had struggled to evacuate the fifteen thousand colonists before the failure of their terraforming equipment had surrendered the surface to sulfur and methane. They had lost civilians. Few, in context, but Greg knew every name. He had been decorated for his work on Liriel, but he still counted it a personal failure.

      The most important lessons, his mother had taught him, are the ones that go wrong. At least whatever was wrong with Volhynia was not in its atmosphere.

      He turned back and reread the question. Mathematically it was a simple problem, one every Central Corps officer was expected to be able to solve without the aid of a computer. Depending on the size of the engine, radiation from the explosion would drop to tolerable levels anywhere from three to seven years later. That was a big reason nobody ran hybrid engines anymore; beyond the efficiency gains that had been made in pure starlight tech, the risks of failure were too high. Nobody wanted to block a travel corridor for such a long period of time, never mind irradiate a habitable planet. The hybrid design was inherently unstable, and nobody had been sorry to see it abandoned.

      Curious, though, that only one Central starship had ever lost a hybrid engine. Curious that twenty-five years later, the site of the Phoenix’s destruction was still too hot for travel.

      Conspiracy theories abounded. Everybody seemed to think Greg ought to care, that he ought to seek absolute proof of what had happened to his mother’s starship. When he was young, he had been caught up in unproven government conspiracies and rumors of alien invasion. He had almost let it destroy his life. Now he had been part of Central Corps for fifteen years, nine as captain of his own ship, and he had learned that the simplest answer was almost always the truth. Central did not have the resources for an expansive cover-up, even if it would have provided some benefit—and there was no discernible benefit to the loss of 456 trained soldiers.

       What is the half-life of the radiation produced by the destruction of a hybrid nuclear starlight engine?

      He swept his hand through the message, and it disappeared. “Galileo,” he asked, “what’s the current radiation level at the site of the Phoenix disaster?”

      There was an almost imperceptible pause as his ship queried the larger net. “Current radiation levels at location 345.89.225,” Galileo told him in her warm androgynous voice, “are ambient 13, critical 22.2.”

      Meaning you’d melt before you got anywhere near it. Greg put his thumbs over his eyes. “A nuclear starlight explosion nets what, sixteen, eighteen?”

      “Nuclear starlight explosion СКАЧАТЬ