The answer seemed to be snow. We’d come out of hyperspace in orbit around a small planet that shone blindingly white in the light of its distant sun. Looking down through the lounge windows, I tried to spot the cities, but I couldn’t see so much as a shadow through the thick clouds that swathed the planet like a waxy coat. The heavy atmosphere hid everything from mountains to seas, leaving only smooth whiteness, like a pearl floating in space. A very lonely pearl. So far as I could see, we were the only ship in orbit.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked over the com.
“IoFive,” Nova replied, her dreamy voice breathless. “Isn’t it pretty?”
I scowled at the white clouds. “Looks cold to me.” Cold and empty. Forget other ships; I couldn’t even see a traffic control satellite. “What are we doing here again?”
“Work,” the captain said dryly before cutting off the channel.
Since that was clearly all the answer I’d be getting, I ran Io5 through my suit computer. What I found wasn’t reassuring. Io5 was a research planet under the jurisdiction of the Republic Scientific Council, though it wasn’t currently in use due to the harshness of the planet’s fifty-year winter. Not the sort of place you took an empty trade freighter unless you were shipping snow, but I knew better by now than to question the captain, and I kept my mouth shut as we passed through the cloud cover into the worst blizzard I’d ever seen.
Below the shell of clouds that gave Io5 its smooth, pearl-like appearance, the planet itself was a crag-riddled mass of black rock, ice, wind, and thick, blowing snow. I’ll never know how Basil found the ground in that mess, but we made our final descent with only a few hairy spots. Ice pelted our hull the whole way, rattling off the Fool’s heavy sides like gunshots.
By the time we finally set down, I was good and ready to be on the ground, snowball planet or not. When the entry shutters rolled away, though, I almost changed my mind. I’ve been to some dirt-scratch operations before, but this was ridiculous. The “starport” was a stretch of icy cement hidden from the worst of the wind in the lee of a small mountain. There was a generator building, a tiny equipment garage, and one floodlight. Other than that, there was nothing. I didn’t even see a signal tower. Though, to be fair, there could have been a thousand signal towers and I wouldn’t have known. Even with the mountain to block the worst of the storm, the falling snow was so thick I couldn’t see more than a dozen feet in any direction. I was watching drifts pile up against the Fool’s side when Caldswell came into the lounge.
The moment I saw him, my heart began to sink. The captain was suited for cold weather in a huge, heavy coat, eye shield, and thick boots. Oddly, the cook was right behind him, dressed the same, but what really blew my mind was Ren. She was standing beside her father, wrapped head to toe in so much snow gear I could barely see her face.
“Going out?” I asked, though the answer was painfully clear.
“Just for a bit,” Caldswell replied, putting on his gloves as he walked past me and down the cargo bay stairs. “And you can stop making that face, Morris. You’re not coming.”
Relief washed over me. Neither my suit nor I like snow. But the feeling left just as quickly when I realized this meant the captain would be going out alone. I followed him down to the cargo bay while I tried to work out a way to tell him how stupid that was without getting yelled at. In the end, though, I didn’t have to say anything, because Rashid beat me to it.
“You’re not seriously considering going out in that, are you, sir?”
My new partner was standing at attention at the bottom of the stairs in his tactical armor with his pistols at his hips, every inch the good soldier, but the expression on his face was anything but obedient. “It’s thirty below with no visibility. That is killing weather. To take a child out in such—”
“I take my daughter anywhere I please,” Caldswell said without missing a beat. He walked to the cargo bay door and hit the button to release the lock before looking pointedly at me. “We’re meeting a contact. It shouldn’t take more than two hours. I want you to keep everyone on the ship and in position. Basil has orders to take off as soon as we get back.”
“Yes sir,” I said. That wouldn’t be hard. Other than Caldswell and whatever insane contact he was meeting out here, I didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to go out in this weather. I was just glad we weren’t staying long. The ice was still pelting the Fool’s hull like it was the back wall at a firing range, and even though I could see on my suit that the ship’s internal temperature hadn’t changed, just knowing the snow was out there made me feel wet and cold to my bones. The sooner we left this place, the happier I’d be.
Rashid didn’t look like anything would make him happy, but he didn’t fight the captain again. When it was clear there would be no more questions, Caldswell hit the switch to open the cargo bay. The new door slid open with a soft rumble, and as the seal cracked, a blast of snow billowed in, dropping a foot of white stuff on the floor before the door had opened halfway. Caldswell shook his head at the snowdrift that was building in the middle of his cargo bay before pulling his scarf down from his mouth. “And clean this up!” he yelled.
“Yes sir,” I grumbled, cutting on my suit’s heaters. Rashid, whose suit was too thin to have heaters, made do with folding his arms tighter over his chest and glowering.
Caldswell pulled his scarf back up and marched down the ramp, which was already covered in a thick sheet of ice. His daughter walked behind him, fitting her feet into the large holes left by Caldswell’s boots. The cook went last.
By this point I was standing by the door with my hand on the switch, ready to close up the cargo bay and cut off the snow the second Caldswell’s group was through. Considering my position, I’d thought my intention was obvious, but the cook clearly didn’t understand that having three feet of snow in your ship was a bad thing, because he stopped on the threshold. He was so buried in coats, I could actually look at him without feeling too bad, and I used this temporary immunity to glare a warning. When he still didn’t move, I opened my mouth to tell him to get the lead out, but the words died in my throat, because that was when he turned and stared straight at me.
I was in my suit with my visor down, looking at him through my cameras. Even so, his gaze cut right through me, and the revulsion stabbed me like a blade. I looked away at once, furious. I hated when he did that. But though my head was turned, I could still see the cook through my side camera, and that was how I caught the way he was looking at me.
Once before, when I’d first woken up on Falcon 34, the cook had looked at me with a strange mix of loss and triumph. The look he gave me now was much the same, only there was no triumph this time. When he stared at me now, all I saw was sadness, like he’d lost something precious. I had no idea why he would look at me like that. He’d made it clear back on Wuxia that he hated me. But as his eyes bored into me, I suddenly had the strangest feeling that I’d forgotten something. Something important.
“Charkov!”
The cook and I both jumped, and I looked to see the captain standing at the bottom of the ramp, glaring murder. “Let’s go.”
The cook turned without a word, walking down the icy ramp delicately as a cat despite his heavy boots. The moment he was out of the way, I hit the door. But as the metal slid into place, closing off the freezing wind, I couldn’t help one last look.
The cook and the captain were both facing away from me now, walking off into the snow with Ren between them. But though neither man was looking at me anymore, Ren was. She was staring over her shoulder, her head turned straight toward me at a painful angle. When she saw me looking, her dark eyes pinned on mine, and she pulled her scarf down to shoot me a smile.
I’d seen Ren smile only once, back in the lounge when I’d first realized she could also see the floating, glowing bugs I’d thought were hallucinations. Now as then, her smile was terrifying, so much so that I took a step back. That only made Ren smile wider, and she watched me like a predator until the closing cargo door hid her behind a wall of steel and ice.
“I cannot believe he would take a child into such weather.”
Rashid’s voice made me jump. I’d been so caught up in Ren, I hadn’t realized he was right behind me until he’d spoken.
“What does he think he is doing?” Rashid snapped, glaring at the closed cargo door like he could burn a hole in it with his disdain. “I don’t care whom they’re meeting, it is suicidally foolish to go out in such weather.”
“The captain does as the captain does,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t even care about the weather anymore. All I wanted to do was go hide somewhere Ren’s smile couldn’t find me.
Fortunately, the crazy impulse passed, helped along by the fact that we had a cargo bay full of quickly melting snow to deal with. “All right,” I said, walking purposefully over to the closet where Mabel kept the big brooms. “Let’s clear this avalanche out before it melts and we have to deal with a flood instead.”
After his surliness, I expected an argument, but Rashid did exactly as I asked. We swept all the snow into a big pile at the bay’s center, and then, since opening the door again would only let in more, we piled the frozen stuff into ten-gallon buckets and hauled it over to the ship’s water tank. By the time the cargo bay was clear, our water was topped off and my arms were aching even in my suit.
But bad as I was, Rashid’s suit had no motors to help him. By the time we emptied the last barrel, he looked ready to fall over, so I sent him to the bridge to rest up and keep an eye on the external cameras. I should have gone back on patrol—this was still a hostile planet after all—but there didn’t seem to be much point to being on guard when we were sitting with no cargo on an ice ball that even scientists wouldn’t live on. But I couldn’t bring myself to slack openly, so I grabbed a mop and started swabbing up the water the snow had left behind.
I told myself I was performing a vital service for the safety of the ship. After all, if the floor was wet when the door opened again, it would freeze solid, leaving us with an ice rink. That was a nice cover story, but the truth was, the mopping was busywork, something legitimate looking that didn’t require real attention. That I saved for my footage of what had happened at the door.
My cameras had caught everything. I didn’t dare look at the cook’s face directly, even on a recording, but I didn’t have to. Just like when I’d woken up in the medbay, his expression was seared into my mind. I didn’t know why my brain cared so much about the stupid man, but it seemed like I was stuck with him. All I could do was shove the horrible feeling that I’d forgotten something aside and focus on what was really bothering me: Caldswell’s daughter.
The captain couldn’t have seen Ren’s smile from where he was standing, and from the way the cook had been watching the frozen ground under his feet, I was betting he hadn’t either. Her smile had been just for me, but why? What did the captain’s crazy daughter want?
I was alone in the cargo bay, so I raised my visor and glanced around surreptitiously. To my great relief, I didn’t see a thing. I hadn’t seen a glowing bug for a while, actually, not since the one Ren had also seen in the lounge. My private theory was that the knock on the head that had taken my memories had also fixed whatever it was that made me see the hallucinations, which would make it the only good part of the whole mess as far as I was concerned. Then again, whatever the things were, I knew I couldn’t see them through my cameras, so there was always the chance that they had been around and I’d just missed them. I had my visor up now, though, and I still saw nothing, but it was starting to be less of a comfort.
I leaned on my mop with a frustrated sigh. The more I thought about it, the less I understood why I found Ren’s smile so scary. Other than the night she’d smiled at me in the lounge, I couldn’t actually remember her doing anything threatening, but thinking about her definitely increased the feeling that I’d forgotten something. I ground my teeth, trying to force my stupid brain to remember. There had to be a reason I was so afraid of her; what was it? What had I forgotten?