Death in Winter Read online

  “Not at all,” said Beverly’s grandmother. “Right after dinner, if you like.”

  Her eyes, which were blue and slightly almond-shaped like Beverly’s, seemed to gleam with delight. After all, it wasn’t often she had a chance to show off her garden, and even less often that someone asked to see it.

  Beverly was happy for her grandmother, but hoped the Goldsmiths’ tour would be a quick one. The sooner she was able to escape Bobby’s scrutiny, the better.

  As it turned out, having the garden inspection on the agenda was a good thing. It made dinner move more quickly, so the Goldsmiths could see what they wanted before it got dark.

  At least Beverly had thought it was a good thing—until her grandmother turned to her and said, “You and Bobby can take a walk if you like. I don’t think he’s as fascinated by brussels sprouts as some of us.”

  The Goldsmiths laughed at that. But not Beverly. She wanted to say, “Take a walk with him? I don’t even want to be on the same planet with him!”

  However, she couldn’t protest—not with everybody looking at her. So she kept her emotions in check and nodded, and said, “Sure.” Then the adults went out the back door into the low-slanting rays of the sun, and left Beverly alone with Bobby.

  He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Which way?”

  Without a word, Beverly led the way out the front of the house—a sturdy silver-white prefab with sleek, rounded corners. It was getting on to evening, so she didn’t bother to grab a hat or anything to drink—precautions she would have been certain to take during the heat of the day.

  The Howards’ domicile was on the westernmost outskirts of the colony, closest to a distant cluster of hills. It was in that direction that Beverly decided to start walking.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Bobby keeping up with her. But she didn’t turn to look at him. She just kept her eyes on the hills up ahead, which were turning purple as the golden light began to fade.

  This was by far Beverly’s favorite time of day, when the air cooled down and the breeze died, and she could hear the cries of avians if she listened carefully enough. Unfortunately, her companion didn’t give her the chance.

  “So,” he asked, “do you like it here?”

  “It’s all right,” Beverly said.

  “Have you been on Arvada Three a long time?”

  “Since I was three,” she told him. “Three and a half, to be exact.”

  “You must know a lot about the place.”

  “Everything,” she said. It wasn’t a brag. “Then again, there isn’t much to know.”

  Beverly had often dreamed of living on Earth or one of the Sol-system colony planets, or even on an alien homeworld. They had always sounded so exciting to her, the kinds of places where someone could see something new every day.

  But her grandmother had no intention of leaving Arvada III. That was where she had chosen to do her work in exobiology. That was where she had set down her roots. And as a teenager Beverly had little choice but to remain with her.

  Wait until I grow up, Beverly thought, not for the first time. Then I’ll join Starfleet and see all those wonderful places for myself.

  She didn’t know anybody in Starfleet, but she was pretty sure that was the place for her. The last thing she wanted to do was live on a far-flung colony world, apart from anything that was of any interest to her at all.

  And yet at the same time, she didn’t like the prospect of leaving her grandmother behind. For all the woman’s devotion to things Beverly found boring and trivial, there was a bond between them as strong as that between any mother and daughter.

  Abandoning her grandmother would be like cutting out a part of herself. And while Felisa Howard had never spoken of the day her granddaughter would depart to pursue a career of her own, Beverly was sure the woman wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “You’re lucky,” said Bobby.

  Beverly turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been here most of your life. Arvada Three is the fourth colony we’ve been to.” The boy breathed a sigh. “I’m just hoping we’ll stay at this one for good.”

  It had never occurred to Beverly that moving around could be a bad thing. It gave her something to think about.

  “You walk this way a lot?” Bobby asked.

  “Some,” she said.

  “It’s nice out here.”

  By then, the sun had gone down behind the hills, leaving a pale radiance lingering in the western sky. Everything around Beverly seemed softer, even the rocks.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “It was cold on Sejjel Five,” said Bobby. “That was where we lived before we came here. Winter twelve months a year. You didn’t dare stay out after dark because you’d freeze to death.”

  “That’s cold,” Beverly allowed, though she had a hard time relating to it. Arvada III seldom got any colder than this, and she couldn’t remember what it was like anywhere else.

  “You don’t ever want to be in a place like that,” Bobby told her.

  Beverly shrugged. “I guess.”

  Her companion didn’t come up with any other questions; he just walked alongside her with his hands stuck into his pockets. But Beverly still couldn’t hear the calls of the avians.

  After a while, she decided she liked it better when they were talking. In the silence, it was too easy to imagine Bobby staring at her.

  She was about to ask him what he thought of their school when he spoke up again. “You know,” he said, his voice strangely thick and slow, “you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

  It hit Beverly like a blow to the stomach. She stopped and looked at Bobby, not knowing what to say or do. And for a moment, it seemed he was as paralyzed as she was.

  Then he took an awkward step toward her and put his hand on her arm. Somehow, it wasn’t as unpleasant a sensation as she would have thought. And his eyes, which she had found so irksome, were like warm dark pools drawing her into their depths.

  He’s going to kiss me, Beverly thought, her heart thudding against her rib cage. He’s going to kiss me.

  No boy had ever done that before. And certainly not on the lips. But she could tell by the way Bobby was tilting his head that he meant to do just that.

  And with a shock, Beverly realized that she wanted him to. In fact, she couldn’t wait.

  A minute earlier, the very notion would have made Beverly sick to her stomach. But somehow, in the space of just a few seconds, everything had changed. She didn’t shrink from Bobby as he brushed her lips with his own, then pressed them against hers with unconcealed yearning.

  He’s doing it, Beverly thought. And then she remembered what he had said about her. He thinks I’m beautiful.

  Bobby put his arms around her, drawing her closer ever so gently. And he kept on kissing her, which was good because she wanted to keep kissing him back.

  Suddenly, Beverly felt a tickle in her throat. She tried to subdue it, contain it, but she couldn’t. In a single breath, it grew too urgent to deny.

  Had she yielded to it right away, it might only have been a polite little cough. But her attempt to stifle it had transformed it into something else, something harsh and ragged and ultimately more burp than anything.

  Surprised, Bobby pulled back and looked at her, wide-eyed. Beverly wanted to hide, to crawl out of sight. But there on the plain between the colony and the mountains, there was nowhere to hide.

  Abruptly, Bobby laughed—and unexpectedly, Beverly found herself laughing with him. It took all the air out of the situation, relieving her embarrassment.

  Then Bobby’s smile faded and he gazed at her as if he wanted to kiss her again, burp or no burp. But before he could move, something happened in the sky.

  The first Beverly saw of it was in Bobby’s face, pinpoints of light appearing in the dark parts of his eyes. Turning then, she saw it for herself—a thick streak of golden fire falling from the heights of the dark blue heavens.

  Sh
e muttered something, an expression of incredulity and terror. A moment later the streak of fire struck the earth beyond the hills, making the ground shiver beneath the girl’s feet.

  “What was that?” Bobby breathed.

  Beverly shook her head, her knees weak with a mixture of fear and—unexpectedly—excitement. “I don’t know,” she said, “but we’ve got to get back to the colony.”

  “There it is,” said Beverly’s grandmother, pointing to a spot among the darkened hills.

  Beverly, who was standing beside her in their sleek standard-issue suborbital craft, strained to see through its forward observation port. “Where?” she asked.

  “More to your right,” said Felisa Howard.

  The girl made the adjustment—and with a shock of morbid fascination, spotted the ship. She was lying at the end of a long, violent furrow in a shallow valley, as dark and dead-looking as a bird that had plummeted from the sky.

  The vessel was as big as some older Federation starships, though she never would have been mistaken for one—and not just because she was a strange coppery green in color. With her flattened-cylinder shape and closely gathered warp nacelles, she was unlike any starship Beverly had ever seen.

  “Putting down,” said Amihai Zippor, the handsome, dark-haired botanist in charge of the colony.

  Manipulating his helm controls, he executed a looping descent that put them on the far side of the downed vessel. Then he opened the hatch, allowing them to join the grim-faced men and women who had preceded them in the colony’s other suborbital craft.

  In the light of urgently cast palm beams, Beverly could see the damage the ship had taken in her fiery descent and hard landing. Her hull was charred in spots and badly dented in others, and there were places where it looked as if it had been clawed by some colossal predator.

  But for all that, the vessel was still intact—both inside and out. Her warp core had been of particular concern to the colonists, but their sensors had already assured them it was stable and uncompromised. It wasn’t going to blow up, taking the ship, the colonists’ rescue team, and a considerable hunk of the surrounding landscape with it.

  The best news was that there was life inside the vessel—a surviving complement of nearly two dozen beings, all representatives of the same unknown species. But in some cases, they were on the knife’s edge between life and death. If they were going to see the dawn on Arvada III, they would need medical attention—and quickly.

  Which was where the colony’s rescue teams came in.

  “Look for an entry hatch!” barked Zippor, his voice thick with concern for the crash victims.

  It turned out to be a difficult item to find, thanks to the beating the ship had taken. But after a minute or so, Dar Xarota—whose people, the Ondu’u, had notoriously sharp vision—gave a deep-throated cry of triumph.

  Using his light beam as a pointer, he played it over a rectangular shape just forward of the ship’s nacelles and a couple of meters off the ground. The hatch cover had been obscured by a long stretch of carbon, but Beverly could see it easily enough now that she knew where to look.

  “Phasers,” said Zippor.

  The colonists who had been entrusted with the devices took them out and trained them on the hatch cover. Then they unleashed their beams, constructing a gaudy crimson display in the dark of night, and began gouging a hole in the metal alloy.

  Thick as the hatch cover was, it held for only a couple of minutes against the force of the colonists’ barrage. Then it buckled in the center and gave way, exposing the space behind it.

  Zippor allowed a minute for the edges of the opening to cool off. Then he and two others, their faces strained with anticipation, used broad-backed Xarota as a stepping-stone to clamber inside.

  Beverly glanced at her grandmother in the spill of light. The older woman was frowning deeply, as intent on the rescue effort as if it were her own family in the ruined vessel.

  The girl was proud of that, though she couldn’t quite say why—almost as proud as she was of her grandmother’s insistence that Beverly be allowed to take part in the rescue operation. But then, Beverly wasn’t a little kid anymore, and Felisa Howard was too respected a figure in the colony for anyone to balk at her granddaughter’s inclusion.

  “We’re in a main corridor,” came Zippor’s voice, received by the com system in one of the open suborbital craft and amplified so everyone could hear it. “There’s no sign of any survivors yet.”

  As the botanist and the others pursued their search, they reported to their colleagues each step of the way. Apparently, the vessel had been a cargo hauler, built with an emphasis on storage capacity rather than creature comfort.

  Beverly tried to visualize it, but she had little to go on. After all, she had been on only one spacegoing vessel in her life, and that was the one that had brought her to Arvada III.

  Suddenly, she heard an exclamation over the com link. And then a softer expression that sounded too much like someone feeling sorry for someone else.

  “We’ve found a number of them,” Zippor announced, “on what appears to be their command bridge. Stand by.”

  Beverly’s heart began to race, her curiosity about the aliens’ ship giving way to an even deeper curiosity about the aliens themselves. Sensor data could go only so far in describing a life-form. It couldn’t say much about the life-form’s appearance, and it certainly couldn’t say how it was likely to behave.

  Abruptly, the ruined hatch door swung open. As Beverly moved closer to get a better look, Zippor began lowering a survivor to Xarota and the other colonists.

  The alien was covered with a hide of beautiful white fur. It was evident on all the exposed parts of her body, even her face. Still, there was something about her that gave Beverly the impression that she was a female.

  If the alien had any injuries, they weren’t easy to spot. However, she seemed to be in great pain—unable to move, speak, or even breathe without grimacing.

  The colonists placed their charge on a stretcher. Then they left the web of light and carried her to one of the suborbital vehicles, Doctor Baroja—a tall, gray-haired man who was the colony’s only trained physician—walking alongside them and running a tricorder scan of the victim. Beverly could barely make out the expression on Baroja’s face in the darkness, but it seemed to contain as much surprise as concern.

  “What is it?” asked Tan, the colony’s senior geologist.

  Baroja frowned. “She’s got a virus—nothing we haven’t seen before. But her species must be vulnerable to it, because it’s eating her alive.”

  Then the alien was tucked into the suborbital craft, where Beverly could no longer see her. By then, Zippor had begun lowering another survivor to his colleagues.

  The girl felt a familiar hand on her shoulder—that of her grandmother. “Why don’t you see what you can do to comfort the injured?” Felisa Howard asked. “They’re bound to be a little scared.”

  Part of Beverly wanted to stay and see the rescue effort. However, she had come to help, not to gawk.

  “I’m on it,” she told her grandmother, and made her way to the suborbital vehicle into which the first survivor had been deposited.

  Doctor Baroja was making the alien comfortable in a seat that had been tilted all the way back. Up close, in the even blue light of the cabin, Beverly could see that she had been wrong about that pure white coat. It actually had a couple of black streaks in it.

  “Can you look after this one?” Baroja asked, his blue eyes as intense as the girl had ever seen them.

  “That’s what I’m here for,” she said.

  The doctor smiled and said, “There you go.” Then he went to help with the other victims.

  Beverly hunkered down beside the alien. There was something about the look in her startling multicolored eyes, something that connected with the girl.

  “What’s your name?” Beverly asked.

  “Jojael,” came the reedy, barely audible response. The alien extended her hand
. “Help us…”

  Beverly accepted the heavily furred appendage. It felt both softer and warmer than she had expected. “You’ll be all right,” she told the alien as convincingly as she could.

  But she had no idea if her assurance would hold water.

  Beverly stood in the soft illumination of the medical dome, among a handful of other colonists, and watched Zippor fold himself into the chair beside Jojael’s bed.

  Up until then, it had been Beverly’s place to sit there, keeping the alien company as she had in the suborbital craft. But when Zippor said he had some questions for Jojael—the first of the crash victims to be treated, and therefore the one in the best shape to provide answers—the girl had been happy to move aside.

  “How are you feeling?” the colony administrator inquired of their guest.

  Jojael shifted her weight in her bed. “Better than before,” she said, her voice a good deal stronger since the painkillers took effect. It sounded like rocks rubbing together. “Your Doctor Baroja has been most generous.”

  Zippor smiled. “It’s Baroja’s duty to be generous, as you put it. He’s a medical doctor.”

  Jojael considered the information for a moment. “Then he has done well in discharging his duty.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so,” Zippor promised.

  “How are the others?” Jojael asked, still too worn out even to turn her head.

  She had asked the same thing of Beverly, but the girl hadn’t been able to tell her what she wanted to know. Beverly wondered what the administrator would say.

  Zippor glanced over his shoulder at the seventeen other beds distributed throughout the domed enclosure. Another eight of them had been set up in a second structure, formerly used for storing generator parts.

  “Some perished in the crash,” Zippor said at last, “but the majority managed to survive. However, like you, they seem to be afflicted with a virus.”

  “Yes,” Jojael confirmed solemnly. “The bloodfire.”

  “The bloodfire,” the botanist repeated. “When did you first see symptoms of it?”

  Jojael heaved a sigh. “Some of us were sick before we left Kevratas. The rest became sick on the ship.”