The Burning Dark (5 page)

Somebody had screwed up. His duties weren’t exactly onerous—he was officially retired and merely an observer on the station. But as such he’d been given a few minor chores, including demolition sign-offs for each section, as well as a list of station modules already packed away that he had to cross-check against the master manifest. It was stupid, really. They were the kind of checks that the demolition crews would be doing anyway, so all Ida was doing was duplicating the paperwork and, no doubt, pissing off the skeleton crew who were doing their best to get on with their difficult and dangerous work without him slowing them down. King too—the provost marshal hadn’t been exactly thrilled to welcome him on board and had been a little frosty ever since. Perhaps he thought that by sending Ida here, Fleet Command were butting in, questioning whether the marshal was capable of running a tight operation.

So far, the one adjective Ida thought of when describing the marshal was exactly that: tight.

But this? Either his pad was bugged or they’d sent him on a wild goose chase to get him out of their hair. One of the greatest heroes of the Fleet, stuck down a maintenance access tunnel on the toilet deck of the station with a glitching computer pad.

Ida frowned at the notebook-sized screen and thumbed the station layout again. The two-dimensional map sprang into life, showing an area of the
Coast City
Ida was pretty sure was nowhere near where he was. He was right out on the far edge of the station torus, as far from the inhabited section as it was possible to get. This whole segment of the base was not only unused but in the process of being dismantled as well. The walls and flooring were bare metal grilling, revealing a mess of cables and pipes behind the façade. It was also cold, the life support automatically cycled down to minimum just to keep atmospheric integrity with the rest of the station.

Ida turned, but as with the life support, the lighting was also on auto-minimum. As he’d passed each section of corridor, the next section lit in front of him, and the one he’d just been through turned off. Which, when you’re lost with a bugged map and no corridor markers, in a station you’ve been in only a few cycles, was a real pain in the ass. There weren’t even any comms boxes—or at least Ida couldn’t see any, being stuck in a bubble of light between two near-black envelopes ahead and behind. And they hadn’t given him an internal comms badge and ident tag yet either.

Ida took a deep breath and coughed, his throat catching on the cold air. He took a few paces forward, and the next corridor section faded into view as the lighting powered up. Satisfied, he set off to try to retrace his steps.

Now that he thought about it, this was a rather interesting section of the
Coast City
hub to be in, away from where the rest of the crew were installed. He wondered if there were any empty berths nearby, or whether the cabins had all been stripped by the demolition drones. If not, it wouldn’t be a bad place to haul his gear and set up camp.

Ida walked on for a few minutes, following the grilled but otherwise featureless corridor, then slowed as he noticed his breath steaming even more in front of his face. Perhaps he was taking it too fast for the atmospherics to power up and keep the corridor heated. Ida stopped and, holding the pad firmly in one hand, patted his arms around his body to try to warm up.

No, it was too far around the hub, and the section was in too fragile a state to be comfortable. He’d settle for the regular crew quarters, but he could at least shift right to the end of the berths, put a little distance between him and the rest of the crew, even if it was just a handful of empty cabins. Better than nothing. Out here, the cold made his knee hurt.

Then the lights went out, and Ida was in darkness punctuated only by the glowing screen of the station control pad in his right hand.

“Well, that’s nice,” said Ida. He flicked the pad back to the home screen and selected the notepad feature. The screen lit with a blank cream page so bright in the total dark of the corridor that Ida squinted before he turned the screen away from him to act as a flashlight. It was remarkably effective, throwing a whitish light several feet ahead. Enough to get back to the service elevator, for sure. Ida kept walking, surprised at the loud, metallic sound his footfalls were making on the bare grille decking. The dark was playing tricks.

Ida stopped when he realized his boots
weren’t
making that sound at all, but the sound stopped at the same time he did. He turned, holding the control pad in front of him like a shield. The corridor was empty, but while the light from the pad was bright, it was diffuse, producing a glow that left the edges of the corridor in shadow. Ida watched his breath puff out in front of his face.

There. Again, the sound. He swore it sounded like footsteps, but whoever was walking around was a long, long way off, the sound echoing from some distant corridor. Ida took a step forward. Then he shook his head. He’d had enough of this game.

“Hello?” His voice didn’t carry as far as he’d thought it would. The rough grilled surface of the walls, floor, ceiling dampened the sound.

When the footsteps sounded again, Ida felt his heartbeat quicken. The footsteps
were
echoing, no matter what the corridors were lined with. They continued for a few seconds, getting fainter as the mystery walker moved away.

“Huh,” said Ida, feeling stupid but also wondering if this was all part of the joke. He turned and, pad lighting the way, headed for the elevator in the opposite direction of where he thought the footsteps had come from.

As he turned the corner, Ida pulled up quickly to prevent himself from walking straight into two huge men in regulation olive green T-shirts.

Ida shone the light up, into the faces of the two marines, but their heads were wrapped awkwardly in more olive cloth. The disguise was childish, but quite effective in hiding everything but their eyes.

Those eyes had a spark in them. Ida had seen that light before, in the heat of battle. It was the light in the eyes of a killer that the Fleet selectors looked for when choosing frontline troops. And now Ida appeared to be locked in a space station with them, all clearly with a touch of cabin fever.

“Abe, Abe, Abe,” said one of the marines, stepping forward. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Ida shook his head. Enough of this nonsense. “Stand aside, marines.” He took a step forward, only to be stopped by a large hand pressing into his chest. The marine turned to his companion.

“You hear what he’s been telling everyone?”

“You mean that bullshit about saving a planet?”

Ida knocked the hand away. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Some jack-shit story, right?” said the first marine. “Nice little tale for the grunts out in deep space, eh? Because those fucking space apes will believe any shit, right?”

The second marine shook his head and turned back to Ida. “He’s a goddamn liar.”

Ida felt his heart rate spike. “Now, wait one minute—”

“Serving the Fleet is an honor, you sonovabitch,” said the first marine. “Now, you tell me what kind of cowardly shit would make up a story like that, huh?”

Ida made to turn, but it was too late.

*   *   *

“Look, Captain…”

Ida closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and began to count. It was supposed to be relaxing, helping him clear his head and focus.

Now the deep breathing just hurt, as somewhere inside, a cracked rib creaked. He winced, skipped from three to ten in his head, and opened the one eye that could still open. The ready room flipped in his vision in a way that made Ida nauseated, just a little, and when it righted itself it was fuzzy at the edges and slightly out of focus. Not good.

“Sir, do you expect me to explain how I fell down some stairs last night? Take a look. A good, long look. It was two of your marines, Carter and DeJohn. I know it was.”

King leaned back, pressing his body into his leather chair, and looked at Ida down the length of his not insubstantial nose. There was no chair on the other side of the desk. The commandant—who should have been occupying the ready room—probably didn’t want to wear out his fancy rug. Importing it from Earth, along with the fancy wooden desk and the fancy leather chair, had cost the Fleet a fortune; of that Ida had no doubt, no doubt at all. So he just stood and ignored the shooting pains that tap-danced down his side from armpit to ankle, and tried to ignore the fact that Provost Marshal King was the most obtuse officer in the galaxy and that he really,
really
wished the commandant himself was still on board.

“Captain Cleveland,” King said. He kept looking down that mother of a nose.

Ida supposed this was his idea of appearing all-important and commanding to his subordinates; considering the jackasses left on the empty hulk that was the U-Star
Coast City,
perhaps it worked. On Ida? Not so much. Not least of all because the space station’s security chief was a couple years younger than he was. Didn’t King know who he was talking to? Who he was trying—and failing—to make sweat on the fancy little rug? Ida had been busy saving a whole goddamn planet from the Spiders while the provost marshal here got the
Coast City
’s canteen roster nice and straight. And now, with the commandant gone, King was the ranking officer.

Maybe it was just lack of experience, the self-important paper-pusher suddenly finding himself elevated to commander of a powerful, if only partially active, piece of Fleet military hardware. He seemed a born bureaucrat, content to manage the affairs of the Fleet from a safe distance while field servicemen like Ida were actually out there, taking the fight to the Spiders. Except now he was supposed to be in charge of the station and in control of its personnel, and Ida had just told him that he was anything but. The marines knew something was wrong—Ida had sensed that already, the commandant’s absence clearly a sore point among the station’s crew. And, Ida thought, the marines also knew that the marshal wasn’t capable of replacing their respected commandant, even temporarily. Ida started to feel sorry for King.

King coughed. “Something funny, Cleveland?”

The feeling quickly passed. Ida tried opening his black eye, but all he could see through that one before it filled with tears was the provost marshal framed in a dark, grainy slit. Ida let it close again, and noted that King had not only dropped Ida’s title but gone from his first name to his last. King was slipping, beginning to think Ida was part of the shitty little crew of the
Coast City
. And Ida wasn’t going to let that pass.

“It’s Captain, sir, and there is a whole lot that I find amusing on board this U-Star. Not the least of which is the deliberate obfuscation of a criminal act, namely the attack on myself by two crewmen under your direct command.”

King pretended to look busy behind the desk, turning his attention to a stack of papers in front of him that were in desperate need of alphabetizing. He seemed uncomfortable, nervous even. “Captain Cleveland, let me assure you I take such accusations with a certain level of seriousness.”

Paper shuffling while you told someone who was clearly an annoyance to get the hell out of your office was standard procedure. Ida had used that old trick countless times himself. Back in the day, before saving a planet and getting a robot knee had brought him here, to the back end of a particularly nasty little nowhere.

“But…”

Here it came.

“… right now we’re in the middle of a complex mission, and we’re against the clock. I need all of this station’s personnel working to capacity. Taking apart a platform like this is a difficult and dangerous operation—I don’t think I need to tell you that. While I’m in command I need this ship running as smoothly as possible. I’m happy to discuss your report, when we’re back at Fleet Command, but until then we have a job to do. All of us.” King looked up at Ida, papers suddenly still.

Ida felt his molars grind together. So, he was right. King was out of his depth. Pushing the matter would do little. At the moment, anyway.

“Sir.” Ida shifted his weight from right foot to left but this only amplified the pain in his side so he shifted back. He kept his breathing controlled and tight, but he sure as hell needed to lie down right about now. At least the knee wasn’t acting up again.

King put the papers down and tapped his fingernails on the top of the desk. “The Fleet, in its infinite wisdom, sent you here to oversee the final phase of the demolition. I’m not entirely sure your presence is strictly necessary, but if that’s the way they want to do things, then I’m not going to complain. Orders are orders. But let’s make it easier on ourselves. Carry out your assigned duties, such as they are, but if you can stay out of my way, then I’ll stay out of yours, and then maybe we can get this job done quickly and get out of here.”

“And your marines? Carter and DeJohn?”

The marshal gave a curt nod. “The marines, Carter and DeJohn, everyone.”

Ida relaxed his jaw. To hell with it. “Sounds like a plan, Marshal.”

“Look. It’s just a few more months. I know time may hang heavy on your shoulders—you’re supposed to be a guest here, and your assignments are hardly taxing.”

“That’s true, sir.”

“So fill your time. Read something. Take up a hobby. The station’s facilities—what’s left of them—are at your disposal.”

Ida considered the marshal’s proposal. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. Distraction, something to pass the time, something he could do on his own that would keep him out of the way of space apes like Carter and DeJohn.

Ida had an idea.

“Well, when I first joined the Fleet, I built, ah … I built things.”

King’s eyebrow went up. “You built things?”

“Well, electronics. I dabbled, here and there. Just little projects. My father taught me back when—”

The provost marshal held up his hand. “Fine. Electrical stores are yours, help yourself.”

“Thank you, sir.”

*   *   *

“Is it on?”

The device was six inches square and two inches tall, just a low silver box sitting on Ida’s table. There were four large screws at each corner, flush with the top, and across the front was a row of small embossed buttons that ended in a larger dark circle.