“You may not like it, kid,” he’d said in his usual irreverent tone, “but you are a blond, blue-eyed female and would have grown tall and lissome. Just like I like ’em. Your dad was good-lookin’ and I made you take after him, since daughters so often tend to resemble good ol’ dad. Not that your ma wasn’t a good-looking broad. Your siblings all are, so I didn’t engineer anything but a valid extrapolation.”
“You just prefer blondes, don’t tell me otherwise!”
“I never do, do I?” responded the hologram and Helva brought herself sharply to the present—and the fact she tried to avoid—that the Niall Parollan she had loved was dead. Really truly dead. The husk of what he called his “mortal coil” was in stasis in his quarters. He had died peacefully—not as he had lived, with fuss and fury and fine histrionics. One moment her sensors read his slowly fading life signs—the next second, the thin line of “nothing” as the essence of the personality that had been Niall Parollan departed—to wherever souls or a spiritual essence went.
She who could not weep was shattered. Later she realized that she had hung in space for days, coming to grips with his passing. She had said over and over that they had had a good, long time together: that these circumstances differed from her loss of Jennan after just a few very short years. Jennan had never had a chance to live a full, long, productive life. Niall had. Surely she shouldn’t be greedy for just a little more, especially when for the last decade he had been unable to enjoy the lifestyle that he had followed so vibrantly, so fully, in such a raucous nonconformist spirit. Surely she had learned to cope with grief in her last hundred years. That was when she realized that she couldn’t face the long silent trip back to Regulus Base. He’d insisted that he had a right to be buried with other heroes of the Service since he’d had to put up so much with them and especially her, all these decades. They had been a lot closer to Regulus at the time that subject had come up. But she was determined to grant that request.
There were no other brain ships anywhere in her spatial vicinity to contact and act as escort. She and Niall had been on a primary scouting sweep of unexplored star systems. She might have resented that first escort back from Ravel with Jennan’s body. Not that there was much chance of her suiciding this time. She’d passed that test on the first funereal return to Regulus Base. Which is when the notion to program a facsimile had occurred to her. So it was a way to delay acceptance? Surely she could be allowed this aberration—if aberration it was. She didn’t have to mention the matter to Regulus. They’d be glad enough to have her ready to take another partner. Experienced B&B ships were always in demand for delicate assignments. She was one of their best, her ship-self redesigned and crammed with all the new technology that had been developed for brain ships, and stations. Like that damned spare body Niall had bought and which she had never used. She couldn’t. She simply couldn’t inhabit the Sorg prosthesis. Oh, she knew that Tia did and the girl was glad of the ability to “leave” the shell and ambulate. Lovely word, “ambulate.” She and Niall had had some roaring arguments over the whole notion of prosthesis.
“You’d fit me out with a false arm or leg, if I lost one, wouldn’t you?” had been one of Niall’s rebuttals.
“So you could walk or use the hand, yes, but this is different.”
“Because you know what I’d be using on you, don’t you?” He was so close to her panel that his face had been an angry blur. He’d been spitting at her intransigence. “And you don’t want any part of my short arm, do you?”
“At least they can’t replace that in prosthesis,” she’d snarled.
“Wanna bet?” He’d whirled away, back to his command chair, sprawling into it, glaring at her panel. “Trouble is, with you, girl, you’re aged in the keg. Set in plascrete. You don’t know what you’re missing!” And he was snarling with bitterness.
Since she considered herself tolerant and forward thinking, that accusation had burned. It still did. Maybe, after all, she was too old in her head to contemplate physical freedom. But she could not make use of that empty body-shell as something she, Helva, could manipulate. Not all the brain ships she had spoken to about the Sorg prosthesis had found it a substitute for immolation in a shell. And some of them had been just commissioned, too. Of course, Tia—Alex/Hypatia AH-1033—had once been a walking, unshelled person as a child. Maybe, as Niall had vociferously bellowed at the top of his lungs at her, Helva needed to have her conditioning altered: a moral update. For a brain ship, she wasn’t that old, after all. Why couldn’t she have accepted the prosthesis when he wanted so desperately for her to use it? She and Niall had been partnered a long time, so how could it have altered their special relationship to have added to it that final surrender of self? She really hadn’t thought of herself as a technological vestal virgin, one of the epithets Niall had flung at her. She wasn’t prudish. She’d just been conditioned to accept herself, as she was, so thoroughly that to be “unshelled” was the worst imaginable fate. Using the prosthetic body was not at all the same thing as being unshelled, he had shouted back at her. While she had been sensorily deprived once, she hadn’t also been out of her shell. Nearly out of her mind, yes, but not out of the shell. But she couldn’t, simply could not, oblige. Oblige? No, she couldn’t oblige Niall in that way. A weak word to define a response to his unreasonable, but oh-so-much masculine request. Well, she had refused. Now she wished she hadn’t. But if Niall were still living, would she have relented? Not likely, since it was his death that had now prompted remorse for that omission.
“Preferably before I became impotent, my girl,” and this was the holo speaking.
“If you knew how sorry I am, Niall . . . ” she murmured.
Information started to chatter in from her sensors. She didn’t quite recall having asked for a spectrographic analysis of the ion trail. Such an action was so much a part of her standard operating procedure that she supposed, in between self-castigation and listening to her Niall program, that she had automatically instigated it.
“Well, well, armed and loaded for bear, huh?”
“Yeah,” Niall in holo replied, “but what sort of bear?”
“Those religious fanatics on Chloe had used fur rugs to keep warm . . . so the analogy is accurate enough,” she replied, amused to have been so accurate. “I remember they went merrily off to . . . ”
“Merrily?” Niall’s voice cracked in dismay. “That lot never heard the word. So what’s hunting bear in this volume of space?” he asked.
“Well, now hear this, dear friend. They’re on that habitable planet which, being the gluttons for punishment they seemed to be when I first met them, they have named Ravel.”
“No doubt a penitential derived gimmick to remind them of their sins,” Niall said in a dour tone.
Helva analyzed the report. “Got an ID on the visitors. Pirates,” she said, for her data files had been able to match the emissions with those of Kolnari raiders. Small—yachts more likely—and some medium-sized spaceships, probably freighters, gutted and refitted for piratical practices and two heavier but older cruiser-sized vessels.
The Niall holo whipped the chair round, staring at her. (Mind you, the program was very good to get this sort of reaction so quickly.) “Kolnari? The bastards that attacked your space-station friend, Simeon?”
“The very same. Not all of those fanatics got captured when Central World’s Navy tried to round all of them up.”
“Wily fiends, those Kolnari.” And the holo’s expression was dead serious. “Last info from Regulus suggested that two groups, possibly four, had escaped completely. Even one group’s more than enough bear-hunters to ravage Ravel with their modus operandi.” The holo slammed both hands on the armrests in frustration.
“I wonder that there are any still alive. After all, the virus that Dr. Chaundra let loose on them was one of the most virulent ever discovered.” She gave a sigh. “The Kolnari were dying in droves.”
The Kolnari—a dissident splinter group that had so adapted t
o the conditions of their harsh home planet that they were considered a human subspecies—were known to have an incredible ability to adapt to and survive otherwise fatal diseases, viruses and punishing planetary conditions. They had a short life span, maturing when other male human types were only hitting puberty, but the short generations were dangerous despite the limitation. They raided wherever they could, planets, space platforms or freighter convoys, using the human populations or crews as slaves and refitting the captured vessels to their uses—piracy. After their nearly successful raid on Space Station 900, Central Worlds Navy was reasonably certain they had destroyed the main body of peripatetic Kolnari units. They were on alert to locate, and destroy on sight, any other units.
“Huh!” Niall snorted. “Adapting to that particular virus would be just the sort of thing the Kolnari would be able to do, given their perverse nature and crazy metabolism.”
“I’m afraid you could be right. Who else would be insane enough to run ships in that condition? Even nomads don’t get that sloppy about emissions,” Helva said.
“Not if they wish to continue their nomadic existence if they’re leaving a system on the sly. Are you being wise to go after Kolnari?” Niall asked, a trace of anxiety in his tone. “You’d constitute a real prize.”
Helva did a mental shudder, all too vividly reminded of what the Kolnari leader, Belazir t’Marid, had nearly done to the space-station brain, Simeon. Odd that Niall would remind her of that. She knew she’d done a good program but . . . Could she rationally believe in the transmigration of souls? Or that the holo was the ghost of the real Niall?
“I can no more leave those Ravel idiots to the Kolnari than I could to the damned nova. And it is sort of poetic justice,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s see. It’s nearly a hundred years since I had to transport them off their planet before their sun fried it. It took time for Central Worlds to find such a suitably remote star system where they would be safe from both nova stars and any profanity from the evils that beset mere men. Let’s hope that they have some sort of modern equipment protecting them. If not against novas, at least against predators. Ah! The Atlas says the sun’s stable. And there is, or was, a space facility for incoming converts.”
“Ha!” The holo gave a bark of disgust. “Any satellite systems?”
“None mentioned. No contact in the past forty years, in fact. Well, I’m about to break into their meditations or whatever it is they do down there. There’s nothing but females on that planet. I can’t let Kolnari get their hands on all those innocent pious virgins, now can I?”
“It’d be fun to watch, though,” said a totally unrepentant Niall.
“Shut up, you prurient sadist,” she said as firmly as possible. Maybe she should also shut the program down. No, she needed him, one way or the other, because embedded in that program was the distillation of seventy-eight years of experience . . . his and hers.
“I was never a sadist, my dear Helva,” he said haughtily, and then grinned wickedly. “I’ll admit to hedonism but none of my women ever minded my attention . . . bar you! Have you considered a pulse to any listening Central Worlds units of the imminent unRaveling disaster?”
“I am and”—she paused as she put the final URGENT ALL EYES tag on the beam—“and it’s away.”
For the first time she experienced a touch of relief that she could approach the group without defiling it by the presence of a male. She’d pause the program—since Niall seemed to talk without any cues from her. Quite likely she wouldn’t have as much trouble this time persuading them to seek whatever hidden shelters the planet might provide. Possibly the fact that she had saved them once before would weigh in their obedience to her urgings to make themselves as scarce as possible when the Kolnari arrived. Whatever! She wouldn’t let them be victims to Kolnari rape and brutality. And Ravel was only a minor detour from the way to Regulus. She not only felt better to have something useful to do after going into a fugue over Niall’s death but also was revived by the need. As she had been needed at Ravel, as Jennan’s father had been at Parsaea. True tragedy occurred when those who could have helped were not there when needed. She was here. She was needed. Vigor flowed through the tubes that supplied her nutrient fluids.
“Feeling on form, are you?” the holo asked brightly. “Thatta girl! We gotta do what we gotta do. Data suggests that there’ll be a lot of small settlements, cloisters they call ’em. They’ve increased their population from the Chloe figures.” He sighed. “There isn’t enough of the geo-ecological survey to show possible refuges. Planet’s high on vegetation though.”
“Lots of forests and lots of mountains and valleys. Plenty of cover if they separate. Make it that much harder for the Kolnari to tag ’em even from the air. That is, if they keep their wits about them,” Helva said, charged with hope. “They need only lie doggo until the Fleet arrives.”
“That is”—and the holo’s tone was cynical—”if the Fleet has any squadrons near enough to send in timely fashion or decides such a splinter group is worth saving. I’ve never heard of their type of Faith . . . the Inner Marian Circle. Who’s this Marian they worship?”
“In this case, ‘marian’ is an adjective and refers to Mary, mother of Jesus.”
“Oh . . . and what’s an inner circle then?”
“I don’t know and it scarcely matters, does it? We have to warn them.”
“Maybe there isn’t anyone left to warn,” Niall suggested. “Hey, did you just say they’ve increased their population from the Chloe figures? How does a celibate religious order perpetuate its membership?”
“Converts,” she suggested. She often had wondered how such minorities did manage to continue to practice a faith that rejected procreation as a sin. “There was a new shipment forty years ago.”
“Ach!” and Niall dismissed that. “Even if they converted preteens, how could the present inhabitants run fast enough at fifty-odd years to escape galloping Kolnari?”
“Parthenogenesis?” she suggested.
“That is, at least, virgin birth.” And he snickered.
“That would go with the theories about Mary.”
Niall snorted. “That was just the first recorded case of exogenesis.”
“Possibly, but it doesn’t detract from the Messiah’s effect on man . . . and woman . . . kind.”
“I’ll allow that.”
“Big of you.”
“To the realities, woman,” he said, stirring forward in his chair. “First we have to find out if there’s anyone to rescue. AND if there’s any safe place to send them so the Kolnari don’t get ’em until the Fleet heaves into sight. I wouldn’t wish that bunch on my worst enemy . . . Even my second-worst enemy.”
Helva had been scanning the file on the Kolnari. “They might be looking for a new home base. Central Worlds sterilized their planet of origin.”
“Then let’s not let them have this Ravel, which seems to be a nice planet. Wouldn’t want the neighborhood to go to such dogs . . . ”
“They have an indigenous sort of canine on Ravel. Have you been speed-reading ahead of me again?” she asked, surprised because the list of local fauna was just coming up for her to peruse.
“Most of the M-type planets we’ve been on have some sort of critter in the canine slot. Cats don’t always make it.” And he shot a snide glance at her. He was a dog person but she had long ago decided she liked the independence of felines. They could argue the merits of the two species quite happily on their journeys between star systems. “Planet does have predators. Furthermore, our Inner Circle does not have any weaponry and does not hunt. They’re vegetarians.” He grinned around at her again.
“So it’s all organic material?” Helva asked at her most innocent, playing on the theme.
“Just the kind of organic virgin material the Kolnari adore.” The holo rubbed its hands together and leered.
She ignored that. “Temperate climate, too. Makes a change from Chloe, which was frozen most of the time.”
“What! No harsh temperatures to mortify the body and soul?”
“No! And a good basic ecology, which they don’t interfere with. Haven’t even domesticated any of the indigenous beasts for use, but then, this entry is forty years old, dating from the last landfall. They live in harmony with their environment, it says here, and do not plunder it.”
“Which sure does leave them wide-open to being plundered themselves. Which is about to happen. Though, when all’s said and done, I wouldn’t like to see them plundered or deflowered among their vegetable patches by the Kolnari.”
“Nor will we permit it,” Helva said fiercely, although she devoutly hoped that she wouldn’t meet with the incredulity and pious fatalism that she’d encountered the first time and which, obliquely, had caused Jennan’s death.
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t know what I could do to help you. You know my reputation with women . . . ” the holo began.
“I’ll do the talking,” she said, firmly interrupting him.
He leaned back in his chair, idly swinging it on the gimbals. “I wonder if they added you to their Inner Circle as a savior.”
“Nonsense. None of the original group would be still alive. They didn’t believe in artificially prolonging life . . . ”
“All cures provided by prayer?”
“Avoiding all impure substances. Like Kolnari.”
Niall cocked his head at her. “Maybe they’ll welcome the Kolnari as a trial sent by whatever Universal Deity they revere . . . ” He paused, scowling. “Mary was never a god, was she? Goddess, I mean? Any rate, would they consider the Kolnari have been sent to test their faith?”
“I’m hoping not. What do we have left of the tapes Simeon recorded?”
“I opine that you would be referring to the rape scene? My favorite of them all,” Niall said, and his fingers tapped a sequence. “You wouldn’t actually dare to play that back at those innocents . . . ”
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” she quoted at him. “If we have to tour as much of the planet as Jennan and I had to on Chloe, I’m going to need to use a sharp, fast lesson. I can rig a hologram for them to see,” she added, since she was pleased with the way she handled holographic programming.
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