Free The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher Page B

arms and looking forward to putting a second pair of socks on his frozen feet.
    *   *   *
    Ida slumped on his bed and ordered the cabin lights to darken. He lay still and closed his eyes, collecting his thoughts. He was exhausted, physically and mentally.
    His efforts had been fruitless. Talking to Fleet Command via lightspeed link had been a frustrating and time-consuming process, given the clearance required for the information and the endless delays that caused. He’d spent hours on hold, or being transferred between operators and departments, or repeating his original request over and over again to new operators and supervisors who had no clue who he was or what he wanted. His original plan to call in favors owed evaporated when it became clear nobody could locate the people he wanted to speak to.
    But it was the interference from Shadow that was the most frustrating. It had grown progressively worse the longer Ida kept the lightspeed link open. Several times it had gotten so bad, the link automatically disconnected. Ida had never seen anything like it, but then he’d never been in orbit around a star like Shadow. When he patched into the Coast City ’s solar observatory again, the graphs flew wildly over the screen as numbers that meant little to Ida hurtled past. Shadow was active; that was for sure. Flares and sunspots and a lot of stuff Ida had no clue about; the activity even seemed to be affecting his knee, the psi-fi field periodically glitching in time with the rhythms of the star as he sat motionless at the desk.
    If Shadow continued to act up like this, the station would be cut off from the rest of Fleetspace. Which, thought Ida, might not be such a bad thing—the last transport wasn’t due to swing by and pick up the station’s last remaining crew, Ida included, for a couple of months. If the Fleet lost contact with the Coast City, they’d more than likely send the ship early. Which suited Ida just fine.
    Except right now, when he needed to get answers from Fleet Command, the increased activity of Shadow was just what he didn’t want.
    Between the endless waiting and signal dropouts, what information Ida had managed to gather was next to useless. Even when he had persuaded someone to impart the data he wanted, or even just look the damn thing up in the first place, there were either no records or a single-line description. Commanders Stockley and Stevens, no record. Lieutenants Yung, Martin, and Hazlett—two listed as deployed, with no further information, and the third an empty record. It was the same with all the command crew of the First Arrowhead. Like the U-Stars they had captained just a few short months ago, the men and women who had been under Ida’s command were mysteriously unavailable, their records vague, their status indeterminate. Swept under the carpet. Just as Ida had been.
    No doubt with proper authorization he could probe further into the records and mission status of the crews, but that would mean convincing Provost Marshal King, as Coast City commanding officer in the absence of Commandant Elbridge, to put the request in. Ida once again reflected on the early and unexpected departure of the commandant. There was another situation Ida didn’t feel entirely comfortable with.
    Ida closed his eyes. His lack of progress was worrying. Something was going on at Fleet Command, something revolving around him, his former compatriots, and the action over Tau Retore. The interference from Shadow was the icing on the cake. He almost felt the star was doing it deliberately.
    Ida opened his eyes.
    The brightest light in the dark cabin was the blue dot on the front of the radio set. It was the first thing he saw every morning, the pale, sky-colored LED drawing his gaze toward it. It represented so much—not just the effort of building the thing in the first place, but the link it formed with the rest of the galaxy. With the radio, he could escape from the Coast City and the weird nightmare