The Burning Dark (10 page)

King reached forward and flipped another page, feeling his stomach flip in synch. And then he leaned back again, and this time he closed his eyes.

7

The
Coast City
rotated
into Earth-dawn. Ida yawned, stretched. He’d managed a few hours’ sleep, at least.

The cabin lights were still on.

He rubbed his eyes, wishing that when the purple shapes appeared he could tell a story about them to Astrid. That wasn’t going to happen. Ida’s fingers stopped moving, and he sat with them pressed against his eyeballs.

He had to keep it together. He had to get to the bottom of it all.

He sighed, loped out of the cabin and down the hall to the vast communal toilets and shower room. As far as Ida knew, he had the place for his own private use, right on the edge of the habitable deck as he was. The nearest occupied berth was a good three hundred meters back toward the elevator lobby. Not far enough for Ida’s liking, but any farther away and the station got a lot less comfortable.

Ida left the door of the stall open as he relieved himself, and thought about whether he could be bothered trekking to the canteen for a proper coffee instead of the caffeine simulant he kept in his cabin.

He zipped up, and stood stock-still for just a moment. He glanced over his shoulder, into the empty men’s bathroom, wondering whether it was time for another of Carter and DeJohn’s hilarious pranks. The space apes hadn’t bothered him for a while.

Ida moved, the rustling of his T-shirt suddenly loud. Then he stopped. He wasn’t imagining it. From down the corridor came the unmistakable rise and fall, rise and fall of subspace static. Faint as it was, Ida felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He’d turned the radio off last night, and he hadn’t touched it since as far as he could—

Ida drew in a sharp breath. There was something else in the noise—not a rhythmic pattern, but … a voice.

Someone was talking on the subspace channel. It was faint, unintelligible, but Ida could tell it was female. He jogged back to his room.

As he sat down at the desk the static swelled, obscuring the transmission. Ida adjusted the tuning and the roar popped a few times; tapping the panel displaying data from the solar observatory, Ida watched as the popping coincided with spikes of activity from Shadow. More interference, this time strong enough to penetrate even subspace. The purple star at the heart of the system certainly was a strange beast.

There! Faint and distorted, behind the wall of noise. As she spoke, her words punched the static, and it flared and danced around her voice, like Shadow was reacting to the signal, fighting the transmission. Ida brought up the tuning dial and carefully adjusting the channel.

“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.

“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.”