“Did they take her?” Jorgun asked. “Did they take Jelly?”
But this child would never grow any taller.
“No, Jorgun.” Kyle used his most reassuring voice. “They didn’t take her. They didn’t take anyone.” There had been no reports of sightings from any of the refugees. The attackers had been as insubstantial as ghosts. Bombs from the sky, but no follow-up; destruction, but no looting.
It was inhuman. But that was the point.
“I’m fucking freezing up here.” Melvin, complaining again over the radio. “What the fuck are we gonna do?”
“Can you fit this in the cargo bay?” It was the first thing Kyle could think of.
Prudence stared at him. “How? We don’t have any loaders here. Are you going to fly it in? And then fix my ship when it decides to melt down or self-destruct?”
“If it blows up in the ship, wouldn’t that be bad?” Jorgun didn’t get sarcasm.
“We can’t leave it here. If this beacon turns off, how the hell can we find it again?” Kyle waved his hands at the blizzard. It was getting worse. In a few hours the alien ship would be buried under clean white snow. The evidence would be lost. A cop’s worst nightmare.
“That’s not my problem.” Prudence cradled the rifle, like its weight was unfamiliar in her hands. “If your Fleet can’t find one dead fighter craft on a planet’s surface, what good will they be against a host of live ones?”
That wasn’t the point. He was sure Fleet had the ability to find this ship again, if they really wanted to. It might take days or weeks, but they could just scan the entire continent with short radar.
The point was that he didn’t know if he could convince them to try. What if they didn’t take him seriously? What if they brushed him off as delusional? A snow-vision by an exhausted cop, a flighty girl, and a simpleton.
“Screw Fleet. What if those aliens come back and find
Kyle would be laughed out of the prosecutor’s office if this was all he could offer in a criminal trial. Altair Fleet would need half as much reason to ignore a League officer.
While he was trying to think of another plan, he saw her move. Subtly, out of the corner of his eye, the casual swing of her hand. But she was dropping something in her pocket, not the other way around. She was taking, not leaving.
He let it slide. Better not to confront her now, in the snow, with her men and so many guns. Better not to let her know he knew at all.
“Then what do you suggest?” he said, giving her the chance to advance whatever plot she and her unknown bosses were trying so hard to make happen.
“That arctic research station has a transmitter. If we give them a ride out, maybe they’ll let you have it. And we can drop it off here on our way.”
“What if the beacon fails in the next five minutes?”
“We can have the autopilot backtrack by dead reckoning. For a short trip, it should get us close enough.”
She’d prepared for everything. Shown him just enough, channeled his every step. He could wreck her plans, search her pockets and seize whatever she’d had to steal to make this whole scheme fly.
But she probably had a plan for that eventuality, too, and it might require his being dead. Better to play along for now.
Like he always did.
“Okay, Captain. We’ll do it your way.”
FIVE
Records
He was so passive it was scary. At every turn he let her suggest the solution, and went along with it. How could anybody have predicted her actions so well?
It was almost like he wasn’t following a master plan, but just winging it.
Watching him with Jorgun, she wanted to believe that. His gentleness was born out of respect, not pity. She could not reconcile his behavior with the armband he wore and its rhetoric of perfection. Kyle Daspar was a cargo bay of contradictions, and it bothered her.
But she didn’t dare stir the pot. These people played for keeps, and they already had their claws into her ship. She had to keep her head down, play stupid, and hope they forgot about her.
What she had done out there, at the wreck, had been foolish. He might have seen. But she couldn’t walk away from the most fantastic artifact in human history empty-handed, not when she expected bureaucratic security clearances to bury it more effectively than any mere blizzard could.
One quick flip of her nanosharp blade, and a sliver of glass with a smudge of the strange blue blood was in her hand. They wouldn’t miss it. Nobody would put the shattered cockpit glass back together to find the missing puzzle piece. Even if they did, they would just assume it had been lost in the snow.
Let them put on their stage show. She would play whatever part they wanted, and wait until they shooed her off for the main act. She had her own breadcrumb now. She could pick up the trail after they stopped watching her.
Cycling through the air lock, she took off her helmet and breathed the warm, familiar air of her own ship.
“How long before we’re airborne?” Kyle was in a hurry.
She was, too. “Thirty seconds after the air lock door opens.” The sooner they got to the end of this charade, the sooner she could get him off her ship.
And out of her life. She didn’t like his contradictions. She didn’t like the way part of her kept wanting to trust him, to turn to him for support. She didn’t like the way his unflappable confidence laid over constant tension, like a tiger perpetually ready to pounce even while it purred. She didn’t like the way it made her feel.
Not because it made her nervous. But because it made her lonely.
Unzipping the suit, she encountered a problem. How to empty the suit pocket without his noticing? And she couldn’t leave it here—he could come back and search the suit locker while she was on the bridge.
The instant she paused, he turned away. Like he was giving her privacy to undress. It was silly. It was just a space suit, and in any case, spacers hardly expected privacy even for showers. Ships were just too small for such formalities.
It was silly, but it was also touching. Again it sparked uncomfortable feelings. She wasn’t used to being treated like a woman. She was used to being treated like a captain.
It was easy to pocket the sliver of glass while his back was turned. So easy she almost felt guilty.
“Liftoff in thirty. Be ready,” she snapped at her crew. Running down the passageway, retreating to her citadel of power, where she could mask her feelings in the necessity of command. Where she could be in control again.
“Melvin, get a reading on that arctic station.” Barking over the intercom while she powered up the gravitics. The ship felt heavy under her fingers, the weight of snow tangible.
“It’s not working. Fuck, something’s wrong. Somebody sabotaged the radar!” Melvin slipped back into panic. Maybe he’d never left.
“Calm down, Melvin. It’s probably just ice clogging the detector vanes. We’ll go orbital and let it cook off.” The boiling point of water in a vacuum was zero. Latent heat from the vanes would melt the ice, and space would do the rest. They could go straight up without losing their position, and then come back down to find the arctic station. A few minutes above the atmosphere and the
But space had its own touch. As soon as they were clear of the sheltering blanket of air, the comm beeped insistently.
“
