The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher Page A

Then he spun his chair around to the computer, switching the map back to the data tables. He flicked a hand near the radio, and the playback began. On the computer screen, the table began scrolling as the audio ran, a smaller window beneath plotting another graph of the audio analysis.
    “She’s talking to someone else, that much is clear. I only patched on one side of the transmission.”
    “Why do you care?”
    Ida stopped, hands frozen above the computer’s touch screen. He turned slowly. Around them the Russian voice crackled on. “What do you mean?”
    Izanami had lain down on Ida’s bed. Well, make yourself at home, he thought.
    “You don’t know who the recording is of,” she said, looking at the ceiling. “You don’t even know where it is from. If she was in an accident, she’s probably dead. And even if she is or she isn’t, if it was near Earth, the Fleet would have picked her up, because if it was some kind of distress call, or if she was reporting on something, she wouldn’t have been using subspace. She’d be on the lightspeed link. What you patched into was an echo. That would explain the quality of the signal.”
    Ida didn’t know what to say. He played his tongue along his teeth, and he felt cold again. Another environmental glitch. But she was right. The signal couldn’t have been broadcast in subspace at all. What’d he’d picked up, completely by chance, was some weird echo bouncing around the hidden dimensions of the universe.
    “More to the point,” she said, “weren’t you supposed to be working on something else? Your old crewmates?”
    Ida blew out his cheeks. Why did he care? Izanami’s question was fair enough: the signal was a distraction, something to keep him from going slowly mad as he tried—fruitlessly, it seemed—to get answers to his own little mystery.
    But the lightspeed link was a waste of time now, the interference from Shadow growing so strong as to make it almost unusable. Even if he could break through the static, all he could do was call Fleet Command again and get some Flyeye to read him the same abbreviated reports he’d already heard a dozen times now.
    “Ida?”
    Ida coughed and looked at Izanami. The recording had looped again. “I’m working on it.”
    “Okay.”
    “Yes, okay.” Ida felt a tightening in his chest. He sucked cool air over his teeth and changed the subject. “An echo, you think?”
    Izanami shrugged. “Could be?”
    Ida frowned. He’d never heard of signal leakage from one dimension to another, but it sounded feasible, especially when there was a strange star just next door pulling all kind of tricks on the communications networks.
    But Izanami’s question scratched at something in his mind. He repeated it over and over to himself, looped like the recording.
    Why do you care, Captain Cleveland?
    “Hmm,” he said at length. He turned his chair around a few degrees and looked at the radio set and computer screen on his desk. She was right, it was a pointless exercise. But …
    “Distractions can be useful sometimes,” he said, turning back to the medic.
    She nodded, and her smile reappeared. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty.”
    Ida laughed, but maybe that’s what the feeling was. He tried a smile, and found it worked a little. “And, you know, there’s something about her voice … it makes me feel … sad. But in a good way, somehow. I don’t know. That doesn’t make much sense.”
    Izanami tilted her head, her frown a thoughtful expression. “Melancholy can be good for the soul.”
    Ida blinked. “So says the neurotherapist.”
    They looked at each other, then both laughed. Izanami closed her eyes and pointed at the ceiling as she lay on the bed.
    “Play it again.”
    Ida pushed his screen away, waved at the radio, and sat back with his eyes closed as the Russian woman’s voice faded into the cabin.
    “Pyat, cheteeree, tree, dva, raz…”

10
    After another replay or two, Izanami left