The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher

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.”
    Ida tapped his index finger against the plastic frame of the computer screen.
    “Not much about this does,” he said. “Subspace isn’t used for communication—it’s a banned channel, has been for, oh, years and years—”
    “Banned?” Izanami’s eyes went wide. “Is this going to get you in trouble?”
    Ida waved away her concern. “No one will find out. U-Stars aren’t fitted out to monitor subspace, so it’s not like anyone can listen in. Anyway, my point is: what’s the signal doing there in the first place?” He scratched his chin and regarded the silent silver box on the table. “A signal broadcast from somewhere near the Earth, using a disused, prohibited system, spoken in something other than the Fleet’s official language.”
    He poked the computer display, rotating the map of the solar system, new vectors drawing themselves from several points near the schematic representation of the orbit of Earth, each line suggesting possible source coordinates.
    “I wish I knew what she was saying,” said Ida. “I don’t think anyone on the station speaks Italian, and the signal sounds too poor to feed into the station computer for a translation. If King would let me near it, of course.”
    “Italian?”
    Ida turned and looked at Izanami. She looked confused.
    “Don’t you hear the accent?” he asked.
    “Oh,” she said with a shake of the head. “That’s not Italian. Russian.”
    Ida’s eyes widened. “And you know that because?”
    She shrugged and turned away from Ida. She walked to his bed and sat delicately on the edge. “I worked in Russia once. That’s the beginning of the recording—she’s counting down, then up, like she’s testing something.” She held a hand up before Ida could ask the obvious. “That’s as much as I can manage, sorry.”
    Ida crinkled his nose.