In Jaeia’s presence, Jetta always seemed a little more relaxed, but today she had come alone. Despite her guarded demeanor, Jetta maintained her usual politeness and purpose. “It’s late, and I figured you worked through another meal.” Jetta lifted up the container she carried in her left hand. The smell the roasted yingar root and karrin potatoes wafted across the room.
“Where did you manage to get that? That’s not just vegetarian, it’s traditional Algardrien,” Triel said, clearing a place off of her workstation for her favorite meal. “They don’t exactly serve that in the mess hall.”
Jetta blushed as she put the food down on the workstation. “I can’t tell you all my secrets.”
“Well, I’m impressed; you seem to know me well. Stay, won’t you?” Triel said, pulling up a stool to the workstation so Jetta could sit.
Like always, Jetta hesitated. Triel used to take Jetta’s uncertainty personally, but as ruthless as she was in battle and as assertive as she was in the war room, Jetta was shy in certain social situations—particularly around her.
A few weeks ago it finally dawned on her—a fleeting thought that she had initially dismissed and only later begun to reconsider: there may be more to Jetta’s feelings for me than friendship. At first it frightened Triel, but over time she began to find the notion increasingly intriguing.
“I can’t,” Jetta said, looking away.
“Are you feeling okay?” Triel asked, noticing the pallor of Jetta’s cheeks. Extending herself, the Healer sensed her underlying physical rhythm slightly out of sync. A common precursor to illness, Triel thought, trying to take Jetta’s hand.
Jetta moved out of reach, but sported a pleasant smile. “Please, I’m okay, just overworked. A lot like you.”
Triel caught the after-impression of her words. “What’s wrong, Jetta?”
“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that I may be gone for a while on this next SMT assignment.”
“I thought that was just an intelligence sweep—and you don’t leave for another two days.”
Jetta kept her thoughts well contained within her constructed psionic barrier. “You’re right. But things can change. I might leave a little early and swing by the Noraeth Colony to question some of the natives about recent human colonist disappearances.”
Triel nodded, allowing herself a moment of silence to choose her words carefully. “Jetta... you know you can always come to me if you need anything.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“I mean it.”
Jetta’s eyes narrowed, and her lips compressed into a hard line. It was the same face she made in the war room when she was readying to go head-to-head with Minister Razar, and that meant the conversation was over.
“I hope you enjoy your meal. I’ll come by and see you when I return. Good luck on your proposal,” Jetta said, sounding flat and rehearsed.
Triel moved to hug her, but Jetta faded back a step. Still, Jetta placed her hand on Triel’s forearm and squeezed, a small smile tipping up the corners of her mouth.
“Be careful out there,” Triel said.
Jetta met her eyes once more, her face unreadable.
Not knowing what else to do, Triel walked her to the door and watched her summon a lift, staying until she was out of sight around a bend in the corridor.
Slowly, the Healer reentered her quarters, and once the doors shut, leaned heavily against the wall. Whenever Jetta leaves it feels like she takes something with her.
Sorting through her feelings, Triel did her best to rationalize the profound loneliness and sense of loss weighing down her heart: Maybe it’s because Jetta and her sister are the only other telepaths around.
(—Or maybe it’s something else.)
The suddenness of her tears surprised her. After a few deep breaths she returned to her workstation, and with a grateful smile, dug into the Algardrien fare.
JETTA RACKED HER KNUCKLES against the railing of the lift as it whizzed down the corridors towards the docking bay. The pain was necessary right then. She didn’t understand why she felt the way she did about Triel, and part of her hated it. To feel like she did made her vulnerable. What the hell am I doing?
“Stupid. Stupid,” she muttered to herself, rebuking herself for the delight she took in seeing the Healer. She’s just a friend. I care about my friend.
The enemy inside her wouldn’t let her believe that lie, nor would it let her feel.
Jetta gripped the railing with all her might, deforming the metal bar. I’m a monster. A sick, disgusting monster.
The lift slowed as it neared the docking bay. She counted the guards and the personnel, making note of weapons and alert stations.
Good, Jetta thought to herself, letting her anger bleed through. I’ll need this.
She casually withdrew her combat knife and put it to her neck.
TRIEL PINCHED THE WEBBING between her fingers hard enough to break capillaries in what was becoming a futile bid to keep herself awake. She hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, but she couldn’t miss the trials against the Kyrons.
Even though the courtroom was the largest on Trigos, it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with various delegates from around the Starways, film crews, and Alliance troopers. Employing her limited authority, the Healer assumed the last empty seat in the house.
Oh, Jetta, she thought, taking the seat assigned to the Commander. Why do you let your sister go to these hearings alone?
Instead of acknowledging the issue, Triel kept quiet, knowing that when it came to Jetta’s absence, it was best not to say anything. Even with the nature of the hearings, the only thing that really flustered the quieter, gray-eyed sister was Jetta herself.
“I don’t even remember half of these ‘witnesses’” Jaeia said as Triel slid into the seat beside her.
Triel looked to the witness box situated below the towering row of judges where a twitchy teenager of Cerran-humanoid descent was giving his testimony. The prosecution claimed he had been a child laborer alongside the triplets on Fiorah.
“You say that you worked with the Kyron siblings during your servitude on Fiorah,” the lead prosecutor said. “Where did you work with them?”
“Uh, the mining ships,” the kid muttered.
“Can you be more specific?” the prosecutor asked, slowly pacing back and forth in front of the witness box and the audience.
“Th-the target drill in the Mirirus division.”
If he wasn’t a liberated child laborer, he played the part well. He kept his chin tucked against his chest, eyes shifting nervously back and forth as he made himself as small as possible on the witness stand. He only spoke Fiorahian, but the auto-translator perched besides his box picked up the slurred drawl common to most of the children brought up in the mines.
“And how were your encounters with the siblings?”
“Uh, well, bad. They were nuthin’ but launnies, really, but they were mean. Always fighting with us. One of ‘em killed my brother Verk.”
The prosecutor stopped in his tracks and put down his datafile. “Which one?”
“Dunno. One of the girls. They looked the same.”
“You witnessed this killing?”
The Cerran shook his head. “Nah, didn’t. But I seen her with him before he died. He wasn’t acting himself. He was Verk, but he wasn’t. Like he went missin’.”
“What was he doing?” the prosecutor asked, approaching the witness box.
“He was suppose’ to be cleaning the guttering receivers, but he was doing her job in the engine rooms cleanin’ the track parts. Didn’t make no sense. Verk would never associate with ‘dem launnies. It was like she played a mind trick on him or sumthin’ to make him work her job.”
“And what happened later?”
The kid scraped fingernails down his cheek, rocking back and forth. “I found him in the coolant room. He weren’t breathing no more.”
“So one of the Kyron sisters killed him?”
“Objection!” shouted the defens
e team. “That is speculation.”
Triel looked to Jaeia. Outwardly, she appeared to be listening closely, unmoved, but on a psionic level she radiated a fear the Healer had never felt from her before.
The principal judge nodded his multiple heads. “Sustained.”
Jaeia closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath.
This is a nightmare, Triel thought, feeling badly for her. The trials had been going on for weeks, and witnesses had been flooding in from all corners of the galaxy to testify. Thankfully, the prosecution hadn’t called for Jetta and Jaeia yet, but Triel knew what would happen long before then: the release of their post-war psychiatric evaluations. The Alliance had been successful thus far in either preventing or delaying them from being submitted by the General Assembly, but soon the public’s overwhelming desire would sway the easily manipulated Chancellor Reamon into overriding Minister Razar’s authority.
“Gods, it’s hot in here,” Jaeia said, pulling apart her uniform collar and fanning herself with a datafile.
“Let’s take a break,” Triel whispered, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“I shouldn’t... I should stay,” Jaeia mumbled, not taking her eyes off the Cerran witness.
For the first time all day, the kid looked up and straight at Jaeia. Triel sucked her breath in. Being of Prodgy blood, she had felt that same contempt and fear before, but never as intensely as is it was directed at Jaeia.
Triel toyed with the idea of pressing her authority as a chief medical advisor, but she decided instead to play it conservatively. Swaying Jaeia with the idea of taking care of herself seldom worked, but when it came to taking care of others, she usually listened.
“I could use a break, Jaeia,” she said, laying a hand on Jaeia’s forearm. “Keep me company.”
“Alright,” Jaeia relented.
There weren’t many places they could go. Like Jaeia, Triel had an escort at all times. The Alliance had assured her it was for her safety, but she knew it was more of a safeguard for their own unspoken qualms. Having a lone Healer wandering around was not good for public relations, despite some of the newfound public support for the telepathic survivors of the Dissembler Scare.
“There’s a lounge inside the circuit room. Come on,” Triel said, touching her shoulder.
Reluctantly, Jaeia got up, keeping her eyes on the Cerran teenager until she turned to leave. Even then, Triel felt Jaeia’s mind clinging to the kid’s presence as they walked down the halls with their military escorts.
As they shouldered their way through the Sentient swarms, the Healer kept her concentration trained on Jaeia. The reporters’ shouted questions barely rose above the clicking of cameras and the screaming public behind the electric fence.
“Do you feel any remorse for the murders you committed during your days as General Volkor?” one of them yelled.
“Are you and your sister still having nightmares?” said another.
The latter question disturbed Triel. That’s not supposed to be public knowledge.
Their escorts formed a triangle around Jaeia, shielding her from the eyes of the cameras, but it only prompted the reporters to ask more inflammatory questions.
“What were you thinking when you and your sister killed your brother?”
“Which one of you was the one who ended his life?”
Triel finally exhaled when they were safely behind the double doors of the circuit lounge.
“Can we please have a private conversation? We are allowed that,” Triel asked.
Her escort rattled off a few lines of Alliance protocol, but when Triel moved to lay her hands on his forearm, he backed away. “You have five minutes.”
I just wanted to connect with you, Triel thought, distressed that he had misinterpreted her gesture.
As the escorts took posts by the double doors, Triel made her way over to the bay window across the room. The view overlooked the terrace and central garden with its statues of prominent political figures of the Allied Homeworlds going back as far as the tenth century. In the distance, the planet’s only sun sunk lazily into the yellow grass hilltops, casting the world in shades of pink and orange.
“I’m still not used to all these time shifts. It feels like early afternoon to me,” Jaeia remarked, joining her at her side.
“Hey, I heard you and your sister just celebrated your birthday. I’m sorry, I thought it was at the beginning of the year,” Triel said. “I want to celebrate with you.”
Jaeia shrugged. “The Alliance just gave us a generic date since we didn’t really know. But this is our favorite day of the year, so that’s the date we decided on.”
“What do you mean?”
Shaking her head, Jaeia explained: “It’s a numbers thing. Jetta, for all her blabber about scientific method and proof, is pretty superstitious.”
“Good enough,” Triel said, smiling. “I’ll have to get you a present. But what do you get for an eight-year-old commander in the Starways Alliance?”
Jaeia chuckled. “I suppose I’m eight, right? Last round of physicals we had put us at around twenty. Don’t really know, though; the way Jetta is acting, I think she’s more in that moody teenager stage I’ve read about.”
Triel raised a brow. Chronologically the twins were twelve years her junior, but no one, Triel included, could really treat them as children anymore. With the Motti’s alterations to their bone and muscle growth, the twins’ physical appearance matched her own age. Mentally, the twins exceeded any adult, and their cumulative age from gleaning experiences from Sentient minds aged them decades beyond the Healer. There were still moments when she wasn’t sure where their actual development put them, but, if anything, their eyes told of their true age.
Sensing the break in tension, Triel finally broached the other issue on her mind: “How have you been feeling, Jaeia? You haven’t looked like yourself in a while.”
Jaeia, always trim, appeared leaner and pale. The Healer wanted to talk to both sisters since they had both lost weight, but Jetta was never honest about her health. Once, after a battle simulation accident, Jetta had tried to return to duty with Grade IV lacerations to her thigh. Triel knew that the twins had a serious aversion to medical care after their experiences on the Dominion ships, but Jetta in particular refused even basic care, especially from the Healer. At first Triel was hurt by her avoidance, but recent observations gave her new insight.
Jaeia sighed. “Run down. Like I’ve had a bug for the past several weeks. I did see Dr. Kaoto, but he couldn’t find anything wrong, so it’s probably stress. I appreciate your concern, though.”
Taking Jaeia’s hands in hers, the Healer peered underneath her skin. “You have a low grade fever, and your white blood cell count is slightly higher than usual, but there’s no cause that I can sense. That’s odd. If you don’t get better soon, why don’t you set an appointment with me for a full immersion?”
Jaeia chuckled as she took her hand back and ran it through her hair. “Time is always an issue for both of us, isn’t it? There’s always that next pressing mission.”
“I know, but I’m worried about both of you. I saw your sister earlier,” Triel said. “She didn’t say anything, but I could sense that she wasn’t herself.”
“No, she’s not feeling very well either,” Jaeia admitted. “Not that you’ll ever hear her complain.”
Thinking back over the last several months, Triel smiled. No, Jetta never complains.
Memories of her first encounter with the infamous Jetta Kyron surfaced in her mind’s eye. All of her initial assumptions had been wrong; Jetta was nothing like General Volkor, and she was certainly not the product of all the military knowledge she possessed. Knowing her lethal abilities and military conquests, the Healer had tried not to like her, but the more Triel got to know her, the more she found that she did.
On duty Jetta was one of the Alliance’s stricter officers, but she was also one of the few to drill alongside the soldiers in her units. Those who doubted or feared her ev
entually learned to respect her skill and fairness, especially when she routinely outperformed her own troops.
But it was the sensitive side to her personality, the one that others rarely saw, that Triel found herself inexplicably drawn to. From the very first healing, when she felt Jetta’s intense bond with her siblings, Triel realized there was something beneath her hard exterior. Jetta cared about those she served with—it was never a game to her, and the lives she had taken during the Dominion Wars still weighed heavily on her heart. She took her friendships, though few, very seriously. Especially their relationship. With all the things Jetta had done for her since the war—routinely stopping by her quarters, bringing her food, making sure she was taking care of herself—Triel began to realize that Jetta also cared about her, even if she had a hard time saying so in words.
“Well, it could be stress, Jaeia,” Triel said, thinking of how much all three of them had overworked themselves since the end of war with the Motti. “Did the Minister give you time off like he promised?”
“No,” Jaeia said, shaking her head. “Leave was rescinded after the death threats were posted on the net. Razar said it was took much of a security risk. And then with the trials... I don’t know. Everything’s so screwed up right now. I just wish Razar would let us go back to Fiorah before Jetta does something stupid.”
Triel silently agreed. Jetta won’t wait much longer.
“Is everything okay with you?” Jaeia asked, leaning against one of the marble pillars.
“No,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m worried about you and Jetta, Reht and the crew. I’m worried about what will happen to all of us. These trials, the state of the Homeworlds post-war—everything is uncertain.”
Jaeia nodded, staring off into the distance. “And now the latest intelligence reports indicate that Urusous Li has found some sort of rich private investor and is trying to re-form the old empire.”
“The old empire?” Triel repeated.
Triorion Omnibus Page 48
