The Price of Silence

by Deborah J. Ross

Longtime readers might recall the stories “Madrelita” (Feb. 1992) or “Javier, Dying in the Land of Flowers” (Jan. 1996) by one Deborah Wheeler. Ms. Wheeler now goes by her birth name and we’re pleased to welcome Ms. Ross back into F&SF. Deborah has by no means been inactive during the past thirteen years—according to www.deborahjross.co , much of her creative energy has gone into the Darkover world created by her friend Marion Zimmer Bradley and she’s currently writing a novel entitled Hastur Lor. Here she regales us with a tight, compelling science fiction story of life aboard the Juno.

Because he had joined the crew at the last minute and because he was still very young, Devlin felt awkward, not quite accustomed to no longer having a last name, but being only “Devlin of Juno.” During the last stretch of space flight to the planet December, he explored the various work areas, practicing maneuvering in zero-gee, until he found Shizuko, Juno’s engineer, and Verity, the pilot, in the galley. The room was roughly spherical, the walls studded with storage bins.

Heads close together, knees hooked around stabilization bars, the two women were sipping bulbs of what looked like real coffee. Spirals of plum blossoms covered Shizuko’s micropore skins from one arm to the opposite shoulder, leaving the rest of her slender body shimmering silver. Verity’s thunderbolts jagged across a field of palest yellow. Despite his medical training, Devlin’s pulse rate jumped. The skins clung almost as closely as the real thing, revealing every line of muscle and bone, breasts round and soft without the pull of gravity.

“Ohé, Devlin!” Shizuko beckoned him to join them. “Hungry?”

Devlin fitted himself into the frame, banging his knees and one elbow in the process. The natural tone of his postural muscles kept his body pressed against the bars, holding him in place.

Verity smothered a smile and handed Devlin two bulb containers and a flat packet. He bit off the tip of one, expecting the standard reconstitute paste. Instead, the mixture was subtly spiced, with a lingering warmth of ginger. He chewed the accompanying bread, fluffy dough layered with potato and garbanzo filling. The second dish was a spirulina pudding that looked like pale green gelatin but tasted of limes.

“This is good!”

“Araceli’s cooking.” Unlike the other crew, Verity didn’t shave her head, but braided her black hair in scalp-hugging spirals. With her milky skin, he thought her beautiful but hard-edged.

A shadow shifted at the edge of Devlin’s vision. Archaimbault March floated at the entrance, like a silent panther in his jumpsuit of unallayed black. Archaimbault March, like Devlin, had joined Juno at TerraBase, neither passenger nor crew, his mission as well as his military rank never stated. Devlin assumed he was a high-ranking security officer; with his restless gaze and opaque expression, the man reeked of covert power.

“Was there something you wanted?” Shizuko said.

“Your captain tells me you are investigating the lack of communication with the December authorities.”

“That’s true,” she replied, without a hint of defensiveness. “But it’s not unexpected, given the recent stellar flares. We’re still on the other side of the sun from the planet.”

December was a Stage Three planet, with a breathable atmosphere and generous supplies of water. Its five principal continents hosted pristine forests, plains, and deserts, all abundant in compatible biology. It had been colonized and then abandoned ten thousand years ago by an alien race whose enigmatic ruins dotted the temperate zones.

The planet had passed the rigorous process of robotic exploration, followed by years of painstaking Stage Two survey. The first wave of colonists had been there for more than a decade local time, enough to establish a viable agricultural community. Sometimes dangerous conditions didn’t show up right away, but planets usually didn’t make it this far in the colonization process without some indication of trouble.

“I will run diagnostics on our own equipment to make sure the problem isn’t reception,” Shizuko added.

From the faint tightening around Archaimbault March’s eyes, he doubted her reassurance. “Very well. Inform me as soon as you obtain any results.”

“You’ll be the second to know,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. Then added, “After Fidelio.”

Once Archaimbault March had left, Devlin muttered, “He’s sure got a comet stuck up his ass.”

“I don’t trust him, either,” Shizuko said. “Why would TerraBase dispatch someone like him to an agricultural colony?”

Verity looked at Devlin slantwise. “Do all military personnel set you off, or just this particular idiot?”

“Anything in a uniform. It’s a good thing you—we—don’t wear them.”

Shizuko laughed in such a friendly way that Devlin relaxed. “Oh, Devlin, you’re not what we expected.” Her lips drew together like softly rounded petals. Devlin wondered what it would be like to kiss her.

“What did you expect, that I’m not it?”

Shizuko tilted her head, a gesture that substituted for a shrug. “We’re used to being a world unto ourselves. Dirtsiders brush past us like mayflies. But we’re out of balance now. You know that Aimer jumped ship at our last TerraBase refit?”

“He was your previous physician, wasn’t he?” Devlin said.

“He was one of us.”

Us. And with that subtly accented word came the hint, the possibility of an invitation.

In all the years since the Fosterage agent had found him in the slums of D’al-Jarkata, Devlin had never considered the possibility of belonging to another family.

Cautiously, the crew was opening to him, as if he touched some need within them. It wasn’t his medical expertise. Verity had paramed training and the emergency cryo served for anything serious. They didn’t have to recruit another physician. But they had, and hoped.

Behind Shizuko’s dark eyes, he sensed the question, Are you the one?

“Well, back to work.” Shizuko gathered up the containers, slid them into the recycling slot, and glided from the room.

For a long moment, Verity stared at the door. Her brows drew together, furrowing her pale skin. Even with odd body language of zero-gee, Devlin sensed she was gathering herself.

“There’s something I want you to understand,” she said, “about the way Shizuko is with people, about how we all are. To begin with, Rhea and I were lovers our first year in Academy. Then she connected with Fidelio—”

She was talking too fast, her gaze everywhere but at him, her voice resonant with something strong and hot. “You think he’s gorgeous now, you should have seen him then, with something to prove! He and Aimer had been buddies, then TerraBase assigned us Araceli as quartermaster at the last minute. Maybe they thought he was weird enough to handle us, I don’t know. Our first flight, we did a lot of ... um, accommodating each other. I don’t sleep with men and that was all right. Fidelio pretends he’s after everyone’s ass, but he isn’t. He’s actually a very private person that way.”

“Oh.” Warmth prickled the back of Devlin’s neck.

“Anyway, one day between missions, Fidelio came home with Shizuko. We needed an engineer. The one originally assigned to us didn’t work out. It was as if—” her voice dropped in pitch, “—as if we’d all been waiting for her, as if she filled some place in our lives we hadn’t even known was empty. She brought us together, catalyzed us into something more than our individual selves. Aimer left an absence. If Shizuko thinks you—” Verity stopped abruptly, her mouth tensing.

She looked at him, direct and hard. Devlin had seen people killed for less. “If you hurt Shizuko, I’ll kill you.”

“I would never—”

“Nuts to your intentions.”

Devlin touched the back of her hand with his fingertips. The gesture shifted the energy between them, as he’d meant to. “You do care. That’s what this conversation is about, isn’t it? It’s why you made sure I knew how much you love Shizuko and that you aren’t interested in me sexually.”

“It’s possible,” Verity said, without lowering her eyes. Then she pushed herself free, through the portal.

A jumble of feelings surged up in Devlin. Three slow breaths, counting heartbeats, gave him the necessary calm to sort them through. Some he knew, the aching loneliness, the longing for intimacy. Others he couldn’t put his finger on, even with the meditation-enforced stillness. He only knew that if he gave way to them, he would be swept away, never the same again.

* * * *

Moving with assuredness, Devlin paused at the entrance to the bridge. The approach to December had given him plenty of practice in zero-gee, although he would never achieve the balletic grace of the space crew. Red-haired Rhea, her micropores glimmering in shades of metallic green, looked up from the array of camera readouts, visible spectra, infrared.

“Ohé, Devlin.”

Devlin settled beside Shizuko. Pleasure tingled through his body as he noticed the long graceful lines of her neck, her tapering fingers, the pale pink blossoms of her micropore skins.

“Approaching direct line of range,” Verity said crisply. Her hair, now freed from its tight braids, fanned out from her face like a halo of spun black glass. She, like Shizuko, seemed beautiful at that moment; how easy it would be to love her, to love them all.

“Still no contact?” said Fidelio. He was, Devlin admitted, an extraordinarily beautiful man, with a fine-boned, supple strength and a frosting of silver-gilt hair, gleaming platinum micropores.

“I’ve been hailing them on all the standard emergency frequencies,” Verity answered. “I get nothing from either the station or dirtside, just background static.”

Shizuko muttered, mostly to herself, “Where are they?”

None of them clung to the hope that the problem might lie in Juno’s receivers.

“We’re getting data now.” Shizuko frowned. “There’s a planet there, but it can’t be December. Not with that albedo.”

“I’ve got preliminary spectroscopic analysis of atmospheric content.” Rhea cleared her throat. “Captain, these ... they’re all wrong.”

Captain? Devlin remembered Fidelio saying that no one onboard called him anything but his name.

“Nothing matches!” Rhea continued. “I’m reading water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, all right, but way too much monoxide ... methane ... sulfuric compounds.”

Devlin held his breath as images appeared on the screens, compiled and enhanced by the computers. He’d expected to see a planet very like Terra, vast blue oceans and a tracery of white over the tan and dark green outlines of land masses. Instead, swirling brown and yellow clouds obliterated any traces of the surface. The entire planet seemed to glow, to pulsate with the atmospheric turbulence.

“What the hell happened down there?” Shizuko’s voice sounded husky, breathless. “A cometary strike?” December’s system had a particularly rich Oort belt.

The bridge fell silent for a moment before Fidelio said, “Deploy probes. Set the data feedback at maximum capture rate.”

“Probes calibrated,” Verity said. “Calculating optimal trajectory. Launching now.”

Devlin’s screen showed the elongated teardrop shape of the probes, chemical rockets firing on a curved path down to the planet. They shrank to pinpoint size and then disappeared.

No one now expected to hear from the planetside colony. Hours passed as the probes sped toward their target. Everyone was trying to keep busy, to not think about what lay ahead. About the December colonists.

* * * *

When the first data from the probes began coming in, Devlin rushed to the bridge. Archaimbault March was already there, a black-clad shadow, eyes restless.

“The probes have penetrated the lower atmospheric strata,” said Verity.

“Anything visual yet?” Fidelio said. “Radar scans?”

“Hold on.”

Grainy images revealed lightning flashes through the torrential rains. Winds battered the probe, blotting out images from the visible-spectrum lenses.

“Surface infrared coming in.” Rhea rattled off a stream of technical phrases Devlin didn’t understand. “Carbon dioxide with significant particulate fractions of carbon and aerosolized sulfuric acid.”

“And the temperature?”

She looked up, hazel eyes glassy. “250 degrees.”

Celsius, Devlin reminded himself. That’s close to five hundred Fahrenheit. It wasn’t hot enough to melt rock, but nothing living could survive. Water could not exist in liquid form at that temperature, only in the upper atmosphere. Rain from those storms would turn to steam, then shoot upward in immense geysers, only to liquefy at the cooler altitudes.

Devlin thought of primitive Terra, artists’ renditions based on scientific speculation. Its eternal gloom had been broken by lightning storms and the lurid red of molten lava, crawling across an ever-shifting landscape.

“Fidelio, this is very strange.” Shizuko flicked the readout screens to display a color-enhanced thermal pattern. A line of fiery red pinpoints ran through the center of the continent.

“Overlay!” Fidelio said.

A topographic grid appeared over the thermal readout.

Shizuko’s fingers danced over the computer touchpads. “Looks like five, six hundred volcanic peaks. That many again on the Continent South Two. And that’s only the big ones.”

“How could this happen?” Rhea sounded dazed. “On Terra and half a dozen other planets, we have records of maybe three or four adjacent volcanoes going active. Never an entire mountain range. It doesn’t make sense. Each new eruption would progressively reduce the overall seismic stress—”

“What else?” Verity snapped. “Some idiot laying down a line of superbombs? Even if the colonists could do it, it wouldn’t produce what’s down there.”

“Nor would any weapon in the human arsenal,” Fidelio said, his gaze flickering to the security officer. “Isn’t that right?”

Devlin turned to stare. Archaimbault March’s features were as impassive as ever, but his skin had gone chalky. The man might hold himself rigid, might clamp down on any expression of horror, but his body betrayed him. Whatever his mission, whatever he had hoped—or feared—to find on December now lay beyond his reach, and in its place a literal hell.

Devlin sensed, tasted, a shift in the atmosphere of the bridge. Shizuko, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears, glanced from Verity to Fidelio. The captain’s jaw muscles clenched, muscle hard against the clean, elegant lines of bone.

Words echoed in Devlin’s mind. No weapon in the human arsenal....

Sweet heaven, what had the December colonists stumbled across, on a planet studded with alien ruins?

In an almost inhumanly cool voice Fidelio said, “We are going to assume that whatever is going on down there is of natural origin.”

“How many people were in the colony?” Devlin asked, dry-mouthed.

“Between four and five thousand,” said Fidelio.

Shizuko covered her face with her hands.

A vision flickered behind Devlin’s eyes, the twisted, shriveled corpses of children baking in that oven heat, of scattered groups of survivors huddled in the far reaches of caverns, praying for help that never came, suffocating....

Suffocating in the night....

Memories rose up in the darkness of Devlin’s mind—the smothering heat, the cries that tore their way through ragged flesh, the stench of sulfur or was it burning tires? Terror molten in his veins, every muscle strung to the breaking point, the pressure of his heart leaping in his throat....

Devlin closed his eyes for a moment and focused on the center of his body, deep in his belly. Drawing his breath into the point, he imagined it cooling and cleansing everything it touched. The smells and cries receded into the safety of the past. His stomach unclenched.

“...commit these departed souls to Thy care...,” Fidelio murmured.

For a long moment—a breath, a heartbeat—no one said anything.

“Let’s get to work.” Fidelio broke the silence. “Rhea, keep the probe going as long as you can. I want every scrap of data funneled into a climatology analysis. If there’s any chance that,” with a minute tilt of his head toward December, true direction, not the view screen, “is a Venusian scenario at great acceleration, we’d better find out everything we can.

“Meanwhile, let’s see what the station computers can tell us. Verity, you and Shizuko take Devlin over in the shuttle.” His voice roughened for an instant. “I don’t want anyone taking chances out there.”

Fidelio’s gaze flickered to Devlin. “If, by heaven’s grace, there are any survivors on the station....”

“Captain.” Archaimbault March had been so silent before, his words, although spoken softly, split the air like the crack of a whip. “As of now, I’m taking over this investigation.”

Fidelio stared at him. “You have no authority—”

“Don’t force me to relieve you of command. I can and will do so if you refuse to cooperate.” Archaimbault March hesitated, shock still edging his voice. “I believe ... it would be best to work together.”

Fidelio’s eyes hardened. “This is my ship, run by my crew. As long as we are in space, I give the orders. If you don’t like it, get out and walk.”

“With all due respect, you have no idea what you’re sending your people into.”

“Do you?”

Archaimbault March paused, but only for a moment. “Point taken. But if there is any record whatsoever of what and how that came about—” His chin jerked minutely toward the screen displaying the images, the tortured, lightning-laced landscape. “Captain, can I put this any plainer? My training is the best chance any of us have of solving this terrible mystery.”

“In that case,” Fidelio said, “you have permission to observe.” Archaimbault March’s features shifted, a flicker of triumph. “From the bridge.”

The man in black went still, and Devlin thought of a panther, eyes focused on its prey, but then he dipped his head.

He’s biding his time. Devlin went cold inside.

* * * *

Sometimes, during his sleeping periods, Devlin lay in the dark in his webbing, ears straining for the faint, almost inaudible sounds of the ship. Always there was silence. Vast, impenetrable, unyielding silence. Once or twice, he imagined what he would do if this silent dark never ended, if in his sleep the crew disappeared, Shizuko, Fidelio, the others, dead or gone, the ship speeding through the void, and he trapped here, alone except for the beating of his own heart.

It was the kind of fear a child might have, to be soothed by a parent’s voice and touch. Devlin recognized the fear. He knew where it came from, why it was so universal, what it represented, how to respond to it. His own worst memories had faded, the ones of waking in the back alleys of D’al-Jarkata, the unrelenting metallic taste of fear.

But that had been years ago, a decade and more. He knew how to take those memories and temper them, how to transmute despair into compassion. What surprised him now, even adult and educated, was the strength of the aloneness.

Why should those memories return now, like an omen?

“Devlin?”

Light broke the darkness of his cubicle, the dim, almost reticent glow from the lowest setting. A silhouetted form moved toward him. Shizuko.

“Did I wake you? You cried out in your sleep.”

He felt her floating closer, the warmth of her skin, inhaled the faint spicy smell of her body cream. Light softened the curves of her face and throat, gleamed off the jet of her eyes. Her nostrils flared and he wondered if she could scent his loneliness.

“I couldn’t sleep, either,” she said in her softly husky voice. “Better sometimes not to say anything at all.”

Her mouth moved against his, an unspoken question. Do you belong to us? Do I belong to you?

He had no answer, only the pleasure of her touch. He freed himself from the webbing and put his arms around her. Beneath her micropores, her bare skin felt like sun-warmed silk. He traced the curves of her thighs and buttocks, the way zero-gee lifted and shaped her breasts, the long muscles of her torso. Her pubic hair was thick and crisp, parted by a slippery ribbon. She inhaled sharply as he ran his fingers over the long, luscious inner folds and valleys. A shudder passed through her. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. With one quick movement, she brought her knees up and out. He felt the pressure of one heel behind his low back and then she was pulling him inside her body with exquisite slowness. Her internal muscles tightened, hard and sudden to send a jolt of almost electric arousal through him. He slid further in. She moved against him, relaxed rhythmically, holding him as he pushed.

When she climaxed, it was with an arching of her body, head thrown back so that he could not see her face. His own left him breathless and with a strange clarity of mind and enervation of body. He realized that for all the intimacy of their bodies, he really knew nothing about her. He knew only that he would trust her with his life.

* * * *

At first, December’s space station shone like a mote of silver against the milky sweep of the galactic arm. It grew to megaton size, no mere relay, but a small world unto itself.

The station floated above Devlin like a celestial leviathan with its gently swelling sides and pale ceramometallic skin. Even though he had seen TerraBase, the size of a small city, Devlin felt a rush of awe. Human hands had built this thing, here in the vacuum, beyond the thinnest fringes of air, beyond the kiss of December’s gravity.

Spiderweb antennae and solar membranes shimmered against the darkness. An isolated storage unit was anchored alongside. Bright orange stripes covered its curved sides.

“What do the orange stripes mean?” Devlin asked.

“It’s a storage unit for solid rocket propellant,” Verity said. “We’re carrying the next shipment.”

“Proximity alarms should be going off,” Fidelio’s voice said. “Maximum caution now.”

Verity piloted them in, slow and smooth, matching the station’s rotation. The party prepared to board. Verity and Shizuko double-checked every safety measure, strapping on the power packs with redundant tethers.

As they propelled themselves across the gap, Devlin saw the grace in their movements, an eerie serenity, the coordination of their thruster jets as a dance. Shizuko’s suit, like her micropores, shimmered under a fall of plum blossoms.

“You’re off target a few degrees counterclockwise,” came Rhea’s voice from the ship, comparing their position with the computer-generated schematics. “Adjust your trajectory by—” She rattled off a string of coordinates.

They found the airlock hatch just where Rhea indicated. Set in a corona of white and black lines, it looked undamaged.

Shizuko positioned herself beside the airlock and opened the cover. The manual controls were designed to be operated by even an inexperienced civilian in an emergency. The instructions were in both written and pictograph form. In a moment of fancy, Devlin wondered if they would make any sense to a creature with a structure radically different from the human norm. What would a being with sixfold radial symmetry or pseudopods think of the simplified drawings of a two-armed, two-legged human with a bulbous circle for a head?

The door release lever lay within an indentation, marked with large directional arrows. Shizuko grasped the flat, textured end. For a long moment, nothing moved. She braced herself, shifting slightly first one way and then another. Devlin heard her percussive exhale.

“It’s well and truly stuck, to use precise technical jargon.”

“Try another airlock in the same section,” said Fidelio. “We’ll get you the coordinates.”

The party returned to the shuttle and swung it around the station’s curved side. A cloud of debris came into view, glittering like metallic snow.

Over his helmet speakers, Devlin heard Archaimbault March’s voice, although he could not make out the words.

Shizuko bent to consult the instrument module at her belt. “It seems to be the remains of a shuttle. There are shreds of carbon-based material. Water—ice, that is. Traces of organic iron compounds.”

Myoglobin? Hemoglobin?

“Hold on,” Devlin said. “I want a sample.” No one said anything as he scooped up a portion of the debris cloud.

Keeping close to the station, they proceeded to the next airlock. This time, both Verity and Devlin tried the release lever. Long heartbeats later, it still hadn’t budged.

“What the hell?” Verity muttered. “One airlock might malfunction....” She didn’t finish the thought.

As far as Devlin could tell, the station had been sealed from the inside. But why would anyone lock himself inside a space station, orbiting a dying planet? Why put himself beyond the reach of help?

He thought of an alien satellite spinning its lonely orbit in the far reaches of December’s system. Space, so distant from his own personal nightmares, no longer felt safe.

* * * *

The next module they reached contained arched docking bays, wide enough to accommodate a ship the size of Juno. The arms looked fragile, like fairy wings. Again, there was no response from the airlock controls.

“Do you want us to keep trying?” said Shizuko.

“Don’t give up!” Archaimbault March’s voice sounded ghostly, distant. “You’ve got to find out—”

“Keep at it for a while longer,” Fidelio cut him off.

Shizuko began cutting through to the airlock hatch controls with the laser. Incisions appeared in the outer skin, accompanied by eye-searing light and off-gassing, gaping wider and deeper with every passing moment. Working cautiously to avoid damage to their gauntlets, Verity and Shizuko pulled a flap of the outer skin free, folded it back and secured it to the hull with magnetic clamps.

“I’ll try the manual lock from here.” Shizuko’s head and shoulders disappeared into the rectangular opening.

There was no visible movement in the airlock hatch.

“Doesn’t anything work on this station?” Verity floated closer and shone her helmet lamp into the opening, over the curve of Shizuko’s shoulder.

“It’s not the relays.” Shizuko sighed audibly. “We’ll have to cut through to the lock itself.”

“Give me the laser and I’ll do it,” Verity said. “There’s about enough room to spit in there.”

“Verity, please. We both know this has to be done right.” Without waiting for a reply, Shizuko dove with slow motion grace into the opening.

“You’re going to get yourself killed one of these times.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

A few minutes later, Shizuko’s voice came from the opening. “I’m through and into the lock. You’ll need light.”

“Let’s go,” said Verity.

Devlin followed her through the jagged opening into the airlock. In the light of their helmet lanterns, the airlock looked gloomy, a cavern that had never known sun or wind. The walls had been painted a cross between teal and gray.

Verity and Shizuko used the patch kit to seal the opening. Then they pressurized the lock. The seal flexed, gleaming like a living membrane, and held.

At a touch of the controls, the inner hatches whispered open. A short passageway, this one a slightly lighter shade of gray, led inward to a second lock.

After the condensed, meticulous order of Juno, the station seemed expansive, almost luxurious. Rotation created a gentle approximation of gravity in the circular corridor. A short walk brought them to the broad passageway. Colored bands, corresponding to the various sections, ran along the walls.

Verity consulted a map and traced out their route to Operations. It was coded blue, which Devlin thought macabre. They followed it to a blue-circled portal. This door, like the airlocks, refused to open manually. Shizuko cut through it with the laser.

Inside, bathed in pale light, cold and indirect, lay a wide sweep of a room with banks of work consoles, instruments and control panels, darkened screens. That, combined with its emptiness, gave the place a mournful quality, a tomb built for an entire dynasty and never used. But it was not empty.

Shizuko, first through the gap, let out a sharp cry. A clump of bodies, seven or eight, lay just inside the door. Some of them bore hand lasers, made for fine work and too low-powered to affect even an interior wall. More mummified skeletons made a tangled heap beside one of the work stations.

Shreds of skin, dark and wrinkled, clung to the clean curves of skulls and intricately shaped cervical vertebrae. Standard issue jumpsuits draped loosely around the bones, giving the eerie suggestion of flesh.

Devlin touched Shizuko’s shoulder, felt the atavistic tremor even through the insulating layers of her suit, thought of the legends of plague ships and crews gone mad. He bent to study the bodies, reaching inside for clinical detachment.

“It must have happened quickly,” Shizuko murmured, “and there was no one to help.”

“Or no one tried to,” Devlin said, his jaw tight. The bodies beside the door touched long-buried memories. “I’ve seen sick people charge an aid station. Some of them were walking corpses, just enough holding them together to keep them moving on, infecting everyone they touched. The militia gunned them down.”

“Norton’s plague? The one that wiped out half of Old Jarkata?” Shizuko’s brows drew together behind the crystal curve of her helmet. “But you would have been a child—”

“So what killed these people?” Verity said, too stridently. “Vacuum, vented monoxide, voltage through the door’s electrics?”

Devlin brushed the fingers of his glove over one slender radius, laying alongside the ulna like lovers in death. He pointed to the fracture lines, the splintering of bone that indicated a struggle.

Dimly, as if from a far distance, he heard voices over his helmet speakers. Fidelio was asking questions, Shizuko answering in a low, tense voice, and Archaimbault March was saying something about mutiny. Devlin straightened up from his examination of the corpses.

“Be careful,” he told Shizuko and Verity. “Keep your suits intact.” Carefully, they proceeded into the room.

“Look at this.” Verity rushed to the communications bay. She pointed to what was left of the control systems, a swathe of blackened metal and plastic. Intersecting jagged lines gleamed like fused glass, while other areas had been sliced and torn, and shards of unrecognizable parts lay scattered everywhere.

Shizuko let out a long breath. For a long moment, no one said anything.

“Devlin and Verity, keep searching.” Fidelio’s voice came over the helmet speakers. “Shizuko, we need to know what’s in the computer core. Can you handle it?”

Shizuko lifted her head. “I’m all right,” she said, but whether those words were meant for the captain or for herself, Devlin could not tell. She left Operations, following the color-coded guides.

Devlin and Verity proceeded on a systematic route through the various areas, Engineering, Life Support, Officers’ Quarters, galley and storage areas. They passed through the medical area, a suite of rooms as well equipped as any TerraBase hospital, including emergency medical cryounits for critically ill crew who could not be treated with local facilities.

They found several more bodies, singly or in groups. One pair appeared to be trying to cut off power to Operations when they died. There were no other signs of damage, no indication of what had happened.

From time to time, Verity reported back to Juno. The initial shock had worn off; the depressing sameness created the sense of drifting through a tomb. Time took on an eerie, distorted quality. Devlin could not have told how long they had been wandering.

“Have you heard from Shizuko?” Fidelio asked. “She’s not answering.”

“Interference from the station?” Verity asked.

“No, we’ve been following you two loud and clear.”

Devlin and Verity exchanged white-eyed glances. Before either could say more, Shizuko’s voice came through.

“I’m here, just busy. Data transfer is complete. What there is of it, that is. Someone’s tried a memory wipe. It’s an unheavenly mess. I’m not sure this computer remembers how to add two and two.”

...the station’s computer disabled ... crew cut off and unable to effect repairs ... while down below, on the planet’s surface, thousands of colonists helpless while temperatures soared and clouds of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acids rolled across the once pristine skies....

They met Shizuko back at the airlock. Plum blossoms glimmered, eternally fresh, across her space suit. The memory capture unit swung from her belt. She would not meet Devlin’s gaze. There was something wrong with her eyes, some hidden darkness.

She turned as they approached, moving with deliberation. She’d managed to get the airlock hatch open. As one small blessing, the temporary seals held up through decompression.

Shizuko was first through the hatch. Her smooth, slow glide halted. She swore, too soft for the words to be understood. Devlin saw her face, perfectly lit through her helmet. In all his years, through D’al-Jarkata and everything beyond, he had never seen an expression so bleak, so determined.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Something must have caught on my suit leg. I didn’t see anything. It felt like a—”

“Spider wire!” Verity shouted. “It’s rigged!”

“Get out of there!” Fidelio barked from the ship. “All of you, right now! Scramble!”

“What—” Devlin began.

Shizuko whirled, a movement Devlin would have sworn was impossible in zero-gee, grabbed his arm, and thrust him bodily outside. He caught a glimpse of Shizuko bracing herself, then Verity’s jets flaring.

A burst of intense, colorless light erupted from the airlock, momentarily blinding him. His helmet radio blared static. The noise filled his head, rattling the bones of his skull. Then he himself was hurled through empty space, surrounded on three sides by distant stars.

Devlin fumbled for the jets on his suit harness, praying he’d find the right ones. When he’d practiced the drill, he hadn’t been half-blind, with adrenaline searing his veins. He blinked and his vision cleared slightly. With a silent prayer, he squeezed the controls. The station’s bulk blotted out half the night. He’d managed to reverse his momentum, so that he was no longer speeding away from the station.

The next moment, a second explosion rocked the airlock. This one must have burst the inner hatches, because instead of a colorless flash, yellow-white flames spurted from the gaping maw in the side of the station. Oxygen rushed into space, fueling the blaze.

Fire reached outward, touched the nose of the shuttle. Glowing cracks laced the walls of the tiny craft. In its place, a starburst exploded. Shards of ceramometal scintillated against the black of space.

“Shizuko! Verity!” Devlin couldn’t hear his own voice above the deafening blare of his helmet radio.

The blaze in the space station shifted toward orange. That was supposed to mean something about the materials being burned, but Devlin couldn’t remember what. He blinked again, praying for clear sight, but the fire was too bright. From farther along the curved dark side of the station came another burst of light.

He spotted a single space suit, arms and legs gently flexed, oddly graceful.

Untethered. Drifting.

The radio channels carried nothing but static. His eyes were still too glare-blind to make out any patterns on the suit. There was no way to tell who it was.

Devlin nudged his jets. The suit hung above him now. Somehow, he thought with a curious numbness, he had to coordinate the path of the other suit with his own movement. He’d had no training in precision maneuvering. If he overshot....

The suit continued to drift. Devlin held his breath. From this angle, he could see that he was going to miss it. What did he have to lose? He curled in tight, rotating around his center of mass, and then swept out his arms. As he spun, he realized the suit was still too far. He flailed wildly, like a drowning swimmer. One gauntlet-encased hand closed around something. By pure luck, he’d grabbed the severed tether.

Devlin pulled the suit closer, winding the tether around his wrist. The suit swung around in response to his jerk. His eyes focused on a pattern of orange thunderbolts. He started to breathe again.

“Verity!” He grabbed one arm, turning her so that he could see her face. He was half afraid he’d find a bubble of coagulating blood or a crazework of fissures in the helmet itself.

Her eyes were closed, her facial muscles soft. Her parted lips held none of her usual tension, the ready answers, the quick retorts. In a moment of stark clarity, he noticed the delicacy of the skin around her eyes, the faint dark smudges as if she had, as a child, cried herself to sleep, and even now her body retained the memory. She would be furious if he ever made such an observation aloud to her.

“Verity...,” he whispered in his mind. “Be alive.”

As if in answer to his plea, a mist appeared on the inner surface of the visor in front of her mouth. It was so faint that for a moment, he wasn’t sure he had actually seen it, or only wanted it to be true. It was gone in a moment, absorbed by the air circulating system of the suit.

The stars spun by in a disorienting pattern. No, it was he who was spinning. Then he saw how far away they were from the ship.

His radio cleared suddenly and he heard Fidelio’s voice, hailing.

“I’ve got her, I’ve got her!”

“Hold tight,” said Fidelio. “We’re on our way.”

The station came into view, slowly rising in his visual field like a massive, metal-white sun. The oxygen-fueled flames at the airlock were almost gone, but new blazes had broken out the entire length. The interior must be an inferno, the splintered bones with their shreds of leathery flesh, the fused radio console, all gone.

Devlin managed to engage his positioning jets again, a short burst that sent the ship spinning away visually in a different plane. He cursed, fumbled, and tried the opposite direction.

Then he saw that something had detached itself from Juno and appeared to be headed his way. It wasn’t a shuttle but a frame lorry, that slow old workhorse meant for lunar landings and hauling. Some TerraBase budgeteer had decided the lorry could also serve as a shuttle backup. Its only advantage was that at the moment it was already outside the ship, far faster to launch than the second shuttle.

The lorry matched Devlin’s speed and direction. Because he was spinning and it wasn’t, it came around again and again in Devlin’s visual field. He thought of an old-fashioned carousel and wondered where the brass ring was.

“Devlin!” Fidelio’s voice came over his helmet radio. “Can you grab the tool arm?”

Devlin noticed a projection from the front of the lorry. He was holding tight to Verity with one hand. If he stretched out the other....

His fingers missed the tool arm by a good meter.

The lorry inched closer. Each revolution brought Devlin’s hand closer to the tool arm. The smoothness of the maneuver astonished him. The thing must weigh tons, built for heavy extravehicular work, and yet it glided closer, centimeter by painstaking centimeter.

The lorry came around one more time. The tool arm smacked into the palm of Devlin’s gloved hand. His fingers curled around it. He tightened his grip on Verity. A sudden sensation of weight jerked at his shoulder. Then the stars stopped moving.

Devlin wanted to laugh and cry all at once. Not even space rapture could be this delicious. Arm over arm, terrified of letting go, he worked his way to the lorry’s cockpit. The platinum-shaded-bronze of Fidelio’s space suit glinted at him. It was all he could do not to wrap the other man in a hug.

Devlin clambered through the lorry’s rollbars. He pushed Verity into the seat behind Fidelio and pulled the safety harness over her head, anchoring it between her legs and snug around her chest.

The lorry swung around, heading back toward the station. The starfields looked so deep, so endless. Like death itself.

“Breathe shallowly,” Fidelio said. “It’ll help.”

“Shizuko.” Devlin wasn’t sure if he’d said the name aloud, or heard it as a cry in the back of his mind. He had seen Verity as dead, called her name, and found her.

He told himself she could still be alive. Out there. Somewhere. The space suits were tough. Even if she’d been caught in the blaze, she could have survived. Or perhaps the first explosion had thrown her free and she was waiting for them to come for her. She’d been behind him....

An image flared up in his mind, Shizuko whirling, bracing herself against the airlock wall, one hand on the frame.

She stayed behind ... carrying the computer core ... with an engineer’s knowledge of ship systems....

Fidelio brought them around, back toward the station. The planet hung above them like a dirt-smudged ball. Debris floated everywhere, pieces of ceramometal, hull casings, wires, crystalline silicon, the twisted wreckage of their shuttle. A jagged hole gaped where the airlock had been. The blaze was almost out, its oxygen exhausted.

Fires still raged through the central section, spewed out by the winds of decompression. As Devlin watched, slowly comprehending, the area where the solid rocket fuel was stored came into view.

Fidelio slammed the lorry’s braking jets, reversed direction in a gyrojockey’s record time, and shoved it into maximum thrust. The lorry’s engine vibrated soundlessly with the strain. Devlin felt it through his bones.

Another flash of white erupted behind them like a miniature sun, this one more brilliant and piercing than the first. For a long moment, the station shimmered in Devlin’s vision like an orb of silvery gray. Then Devlin’s vision cleared and he realized the ghostly shape was only a retinal after-image.

Shards of what had been the massive space station glittered like metallic confetti against the velvet black. Devlin blinked, and saw they were hurling outward in all directions.

Devlin felt as if he too were flying apart, like the station, little bits in all directions. He mustn’t start thinking about Shizuko.

There was no ping! as the first shards ricocheted off the lorry’s rollbars. Devlin saw rather than heard the impact. Fidelio muttered unintelligible curses under his breath. The lorry, never intended for speed, labored on.

Juno’s airlock gaped before them. Fidelio brought the lorry in full speed. Someone—Rhea would be in command—had deployed the brake nets. They skidded across the landing surface, then plowed into the first net. The cords tightened and stretched, damping momentum. Then everything jolted to a stop. Devlin saw it coming and braced himself. His neck muscles tightened automatically. The suit gave him a blessed measure of support. The second net sprang into place as the lorry rebounded.

The outer hatches of the airlock slid closed. Lights marked the pressurization cycle.

Fidelio unclipped his harness and swung around to secure the tie-downs for the lorry. Devlin fumbled with his own straps. His hands seemed to belong to someone else, but he managed to get everything loose, even Verity’s safety harness. Fidelio caught her other arm and propelled the three of them into the inner airlock.

The anonymous gray walls had never seemed gloomier or more claustrophobic. Araceli met them there, a respirator in one hand and a Jarvik CPR unit, still in its case, strap looped around his other elbow.

“Ship damage?” Fidelio said.

“Minimal.” Araceli reached for Verity.

“Careful!” Devlin said. “I want to x-ray her before I get her out of the suit.”

Together with Fidelio, Araceli supported Verity, one on either arm. They guided her down the corridor, twisting in unison to change direction at corners, shifting orientation for the best, smoothest speed, kicking off walls and handholds as if they’d rehearsed the route. Devlin spun, banged elbows, but somehow kept up with them. The two men enclosed her by their presence. Neither was her lover, but until that moment Devlin had not realized how much they loved her.

Shizuko....

They took Verity to the medical bay. The tests came back clear for fractures or gross internal organ damage, but showing the radiolucency pattern suggestive of swollen, sprained neck ligaments. She was going to have a miserable whiplash.

Devlin improvised a supportive collar, cutting it from foam splinting material. He slipped her helmet off, stabilized her neck and slipped on the collar. Her carotid pulses felt strong and steady under his fingers.

With Araceli’s help, he eased Verity out of her suit and anchored her to the gurney. She moaned and opened her eyes.

“What the hell?” were her first words.

Araceli, floating beside her head, said, “She’s all right.”

“Any pain?” Devlin said, waving the quartermaster to shut up.

Verity rubbed her temple and tugged at the cervical collar, scowling. “Just my head. What hit me? What is this ... thing around my neck?”

Devlin wanted to laugh and cry in relief. They had lost Shizuko, the computer core, and whatever secrets it held. But at least he could count this small victory.

* * * *

Devlin, his legs hooked around a stabilization frame, watched Verity sleep. From time to time, her eyes moved behind her closed lids. Dreaming, but of what? She moaned, a sound like the beginning of a sob deep in her throat. He touched her hand, the warm smooth skin, and she quieted. Did she know, even in her dreams, that she was safe with him? As long as he kept his focus on her, he could never wish Shizuko were lying here instead.

A shadow hovered at the entrance to the medical bay. Even without turning his head, Devlin knew who it was. Rage flickered at the corners of his mind, curled like tentacles of smoke through his guts.

“What do you want?”

“To talk to you.” The voice wove silk through the smoke. Silk like an assassin’s garrote.

“I’m busy.”

“Oh, surely not.” Archaimbault March propelled himself to the side of the bed, arrested his momentum with practiced ease. “You wouldn’t want the death of the engineer to be for nothing.”

“What’s it to you?” Devlin spared no energy keeping the hostility from his voice.

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“You—and everything you stand for.”

Gray eyes blinked. “I confess I find your attitude puzzling. I have done nothing to harm you. Have I? And yet, we do have a common purpose.”

Devlin looked away, to Verity’s serene features. “We do not. I save lives. You spend them.”

“I had nothing to do with the death of your engineer. Or the colonists and the crew on the space station. In fact, I am as anxious as you to discover the cause.”

For a long moment, Devlin said nothing. His breath stilled in his throat. He turned his head to look at the black-clad man.

“Was there anything?” Archaimbault March went on, his words now coming in a rush. “Anything the engineer found in the computer records? Anything that might tell us what happened to December?” He shifted, his dark form towering above Devlin. Devlin heard the harmonics of urgency ringing in his voice.

In Devlin’s mind, pieces came together, slipping seamlessly into place. Shizuko found it.

Slowly, he tilted his head in a spacer’s negative. “As far as we know, Captain Fidelio was right. It was a natural disaster. A cometary strike setting off widespread tectonic instability.”

Pale lips pressed together. “That doesn’t explain the bodies on the station, or why it was sabotaged. I heard what happened with the spider wire when you were leaving.”

“Populations such as the station crew are subject to paranoid delusions,” Devlin said, putting all the authority he had learned in medical training behind his words. “It’s a closed-feedback loop phenomenon, undoubtedly triggered by grief and isolation. As for the sabotage ... survivor guilt is the most likely explanation. That’s what my official medical report will conclude.”

Devlin closed his eyes and turned away from Archaimbault March’s instant of unguarded frustration. Whatever the black-clad man’s suspicions, he had no answers, no evidence of what he had come to find. Nor, thanks to Shizuko, would he ever.

When Archaimbault March had left, Verity opened her eyes. Devlin, bending over her, realized she had been awake, holding herself motionless, controlling her breathing to simulate sleep, through the entire conversation.

She gestured for him to come closer. When he did so, her breath whispered across his cheek.

“There was no spider wire. She said that so we would get away.”

He drew back, far enough to meet her gaze again, the layers of light and grief and understanding. “I know.”

They must never say more, never mention what Shizuko had found, records of the device the colonists had unearthed in the alien ruins, the planet killer, a weapon so terrible that she would die rather than see it in the hands of Archaimbault March and his kind. She would die, but she would not kill, and her last gift to them had been their lives.

And all they had left of her was a terrible emptiness in the heart, and a terrible clenching at the back of the throat that was the price of silence.