Price of Ransom

by Kate Elliott

  “—and I will tell you about them. So I followed him, for I was in great fear. And he told me about a fount of blood that is revealed by setting afire …”

  “Kyosti?” she whispered. She took a step toward him.

  “There was no water on Betaos. It was only sand. But it got sticky when her blood leaked into it. It gave off a sweet smell, that combination. No one could ever explain to me why that was.”

  “Kyosti.”

  He continued to rave, on and on, describing incidental details about a place called Betaos. And then another place, called Helsinki, and a room, and the texture of a chair and the smell of spring flowers opening in the cool morning air. Mixed with the scent of death.

  Lily knelt on the bed and reached out and cupped his face in her hands.

  “Kyosti.” She was more frightened of his complete nonrecognition of her than by anything that had happened before. Violence, or accusations, or pleas, she could have dealt with. But now she was afraid that he had lost his mind.

  He did not respond to her touch, not even when she put her arms around him. He only continued to talk, gesturing with his hands as he described more precise details, mostly of scents, to his unseen audience.

  She let go of him finally because it was too painful to her to think that he no longer knew her—that she could be obliterated so easily from his world. It hurt. Worse than any physical wound, because still, after all this time, she had not brought herself to the conscious point of admitting how much he meant to her. Because it was too late for the admission to make any difference: that she had sheltered him all this time, shielded him from the consequences of his attacks on Finch, from his murder of the asteroid miner who had once been her lover, for the most shameful reason: that she loved him. She would have cried, but she no longer had the luxury of such a display. At Roanoak clinic her tears—unplanned, surprising even her—had made him come with her. He had said she would be better off without him. Maybe it was true. But maybe he would have been better off to have stayed there, to continue his work unconstrained by attachments. And yet—

  “Kyosti,” she said, trying one last time.

  He continued talking as if he had not heard her. His speech was deteriorating into a language she could not understand, sprinkled with words she did. She stepped back to the door, laid her hand on the panel.

  He broke off in midsentence and looked straight at her. She took her hand off the panel, feeling a sudden thrill of relief.

  “Don’t lock me up.” He spoke to her as he would speak to any unsympathetic stranger. “Please. Don’t lock me up.” It was almost as if he was begging her. He sounded very young and frightened.

  “It’s only for a little while.” She moved toward him. “I’ll be here with you as often as I can, Kyosti, but you have to understand—”

  “Don’t lock me up. Please.” Like a broken recording or the decayed loop of the Forlorn Hope’s distress beacon, he was simply repeating some phrase from his past that her movement to the door had triggered. He was not talking to her at all, really. “Don’t lock me up.”

  She had to look away. It was too agonizing to watch him deteriorate into someone confused, reduced to this kind of abject pleading. It was as if Kyosti was not even in the room with her anymore.

  “Don’t lock me up. Please.”

  And in any case, she had no choice.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she pressed the panel and left the room, coding it to lock behind her.

  In the outer room, the Mule still sat, waiting. Mercifully, it said nothing. Pinto had left. Before she had even had a chance to recover, the door slipped aside to admit Yehoshua and Aliasing.

  Lia’s eyes were red, puffed from tears. She had huddled in against herself. Small to begin with, she seemed on the verge of collapsing into nothing. She did not sit until Lily motioned her to the chair, where she sat gripping her knees, shoulders hunched, head down.

  At a nod from Lily, Yehoshua and the Mule left. Lily remained standing.

  “They won’t tell me how Jenny is,” said Lia at last, her voice so faint it almost dissolved into the hush of the cabin.

  “Do you think you deserve to know?” Lily demanded.

  For a moment she regretted the harshness of her words. Lia trembled, shrank, and put a hand up to cover her eyes. But lowered it again, although she still stared at the floor.

  “No,” she murmured. “I don’t deserve to know.”

  She stopped, but there was such a palpable air of her being about to go on, given enough resolve, that Lily kept silent.

  “They said they just meant to impound the ship and take everyone back to Arcadia to appear before a court. That’s the way it worked before, in military matters. My mother often dealt with the military arm, and any soldier of whatever rank was always given an appearance before a fair court.”

  Lia paused, catching her breath after this first effusion, and looked up at Lily as if hoping that the matter was now explained.

  “I don’t understand.” Lily paced to the door and back. “If you didn’t agree with the mutiny in the first place, why didn’t you ask to go with Machiko and the others when we put them off the ship? Fair court or not, I think you know that mutiny is comparable to treason and the penalty is death.”

  Lia did not reply immediately. She seemed to shrink farther into the couch, looking so insubstantial as to be almost nonexistent. Her cloud of dark hair fairly screened her face.

  “They said—” she began, and faltered. Her voice was so faint that Lily had to approach the edge of the couch to hear her. “They said Jehane had sent them, to bring me back to them. He sent me a private message, while we were still in orbit around Arcadia. Before your accident. Before Central fell. He said he would send for me, when he controlled the planet. He wanted me to be his—” Her voice caught, but she mastered the impulse to cry. “To be his consort.” The words, or some memory of Jehane or his message, seemed to give her strength. “But I didn’t hear anything else from him. And then Pinto and Paisley brought you back, and you were hurt so badly. They said Jehane tried to kill you, but …”

  “But you didn’t believe them,” Lily said, feeling tired. She wondered if Lia’s obvious, and long-repressed, love for Jehane had blinded her as thoroughly as Robbie’s idealism had blinded him.

  “No,” Lia admitted, sounding strangely matter-of-fact. “That someone else, one of his lieutenants, might have tried—I could believe that. But not Jehane.”

  Lily smiled wryly. “Well, I’ll say this for him, he was sincerely sorry to have to do it.”

  Lia glanced up. A surge of anger sparked in her expression, as if she was about to argue with this assertion, and then she thought better of it and lowered her gaze to stare at the floor again.

  “Then the mutiny came,” Lia continued. “I couldn’t stop it, not by myself. And Jenny”—for a moment she looked as stubborn as Paisley—“I do love Jenny, for everything she’s done for me.” She stopped, waiting for Lily to dispute the fact. But Lily could only turn away, glad that Jenny was not here to discover that Lia’s love for her sprang out of gratitude, not sentiment.

  “I wanted Jenny to have a home,” Lia insisted. “I wouldn’t have left her without a place that belonged to her. Even when I found out who Jehane was, that he was Mendi, I could have gotten a message to him. But I wouldn’t have left her without the stability of a home, of a family. But she has that now. There’s no reason I can’t go back to Jehane.”

  Lily turned sharply back. It was not even that Lia had betrayed Jenny and Gregori, and the entire crew. But the thought that Lia’s action had precipitated the events that had led to Kyosti being locked in the next room, the possibility that his perhaps inevitable reaction to that moment when he believed Lily dead had driven him insane … that Aliasing could calmly sit there and so blithely forget what she had seen on the bridge—

  An abrupt surge of physical anger ripped through Lily. She had to resist the urge to raise a hand against Aliasing. Until, tur
ning, she saw Lia’s face. The animation, all unconscious, that lit Lia’s face as the young woman contemplated her return to Jehane tempered Lily’s anger. She herself had acted impulsively, going into a riot at Roanoak to find Kyosti. It was no excuse, and yet she recognized that there are times when emotion overwhelms rationality. Sometimes it led to great victories. Sometimes it led to disaster. And she remembered the look she had seen on Alexander Jehane’s face when he had met Lia again on Blessings. Sweetness was not a trait she would ever have identified in Jehane, but that one time—that one time, the way he had commented on Lia’s beauty, she would even have called him tender. The full force of what might be the only authentic emotion Alexander Jehane had ever allowed himself to feel would be hard to resist. She could not bring herself to vent her fury on Aliasing.

  “If you did go back to Jehane, what makes you think that his lieutenant Kuan-yin—who, according to Comrade Vanov is the same person who arranged for our deaths, and yours and Gregori’s, here—won’t try to kill you again? And succeed next time.”

  There was a slight chime at the door, and it slipped open to reveal Jenny. The mercenary had one arm in a sling, bound to her chest. Her face, though clean, was bruised and swollen.

  Lia’s back was to the door. “Jehane will protect me,” she said firmly. She turned her head. “Jenny!” And stood up.

  Jenny’s expression, beneath the bruises, was a mask, taut and controlled. “You’re leaving with the survivors,” she said at last, as if she had just that moment realized it. “Back to the Boukephalos.” Behind her, in the corridor, Gregori loitered; behind him stood Yehoshua, still armed.

  “Sit down,” Lily said, gesturing to the chair.

  “I’d rather not,” Jenny replied.

  “Jenny,” Lia began, pleading, “I never meant—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Jenny snapped, losing her temper. “You made it pretty damn obvious when you let Vanov on board. You almost killed my son.”

  “I couldn’t have known,” Lia exclaimed, defending herself with anger. Behind Yehoshua, two Ridanis passed carrying a stretcher. A thin plastine sheet covered the body that lay on it. “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re wrong.” Jenny’s voice was calm again. She shifted and winced, some pain in her body aggravated by her new stance. “I might have done the same thing, for you.”

  Lia began to cry. Silent, and with dignity, but tears coursed down her face, slipping off her jaw to wet the collar of her tunic. Jenny’s lack of reaction was more distressing to Lily than her previous anger.

  “You’d better go,” Lily said to Aliasing. “Yehoshua will escort you. You can collect your belongings, and then he’ll take you to the shuttle.”

  Lia seemed not to have heard her. “Don’t hate me, Jenny,” she said, soft.

  Jenny turned her face away. “I don’t hate you, Lia,” she replied, softer.

  Without looking at anyone else, Lia walked out of the room. Gregori backed away from her. Lia’s shoulders shook, as if that tiny, final rejection had finally broken her composure.

  Yehoshua, face painfully blank, led her away. The veil of her black hair was the last sight Lily had of her.

  “Jenny.” She said the name tentatively.

  “Not now.” Jenny’s voice was drawn tight with anguish. She stood, not moving, not speaking, for a long space of time. The angle of her head highlighted a fresh cut, running from the corner of one eye to the cheek beneath, one more legacy of Vanov’s short stay. Finally she turned and without a word went out into the corridor, took Gregori’s hand, and walked away.

  Rainbow appeared in the doorway, hesitating. She held a pistol in one hand, by the barrel.

  Lily motioned her in. “What’s that? I thought Yehoshua collected all their guns.”

  “We found ya one, Captain,” Rainbow explained, holding the pistol out. “It were in the back corner by ya life support console. Some person flung it so hard it dented ya console. Can’t have come there any other way, we reckoned by seeing where it lay.” She shrugged. “I thought you might wish to see it.”

  “No.” Lily took a step back, realizing with sudden revulsion that this dull, inert thing must be Vanov’s pistol, flung so far and so hard away from her in that infinity of time given Kyosti inside the window. “No,” she echoed. “Take it away.”

  With a brisk nod, Rainbow retreated. The door sighed shut behind her, leaving Lily alone in the captain’s suite.

  The silence was for the moment too oppressive. She returned to the other room to check on Kyosti. He did not respond to her entrance. He lay still on the bed, eyes open and dilated. His breathing seemed regular, but it was shallow. Frightened, she tried to find his pulse, but it was faint and slow. His skin seemed uncomfortably cool to her touch.

  She jumped up and slapped the com. Within minutes Hawk’s assistant Flower arrived. Her look of concern, incongruous against the wild cheerfulness of the tattoos decorating her face and hands, deepened as she examined him. At last she looked up at Lily.

  “I think he be gone catatonic, min Ransome. There be nothing I can do, but watch him and keep him in fluids.”

  “What have I done?” whispered Lily.

  “B’ain’t nothing you done, Captain,” Flower answered, puzzled. “It be ya shock, likely. It be up to him to come out when his mind can face up to what he done, back there. You just mun be ya patient.”

  “My best virtue,” muttered Lily, but Flower did not get the joke. And the only thing that came to Lily’s mind, staring at Kyosti’s inert form, was an old chorale that Bach sang on occasion.

  Ich bin’s, ich sollte büssen,

  An Händen und an Füssen

  Gebunden in der Höll’!

  Die Geisseln und die Banden,

  Und was due ausgestanden,

  Das hat verdienet meine Seel’.

  “It is I. I should atone,

  My hands and feet

  bound, in hell.

  The scourges, and the fetters,

  and all that Thou didst endure,

  that has my soul earned.”

  5 Belly Down Day

  YEHOSHUA FELT SOME SYMPATHY for Aliasing. He had met Alexander Jehane about five years back, and he still remembered vividly the impact of that meeting. Its main result had been to send his cousin Alsayid into a frenzy of revolutionary fervor. Born two years apart to sisters in a large House, the two boys had naturally grown close, with Yehoshua’s practicality tempering Alsayid’s enthusiasms. Jehane had impressed Yehoshua, but Alsayid had drawn him into Jehane’s revolution and eventually into Jehane’s army. It still seemed ironic to Yehoshua that he, not Alsayid, had been given more responsibility and what was in essence—despite Jehane’s official stance against ‘rank’—a higher position within the Provisional Armed Forces. And doubly ironic that Alsayid, the real convert, had died for the cause.

  And yet not ironic at all. But Alsayid’s death had destroyed Yehoshua’s faith in Jehane. He knew it was irrational, to assign blame for what had been a tactical failure—the disastrous attempt on Landfall—but his belief in the revolution had clouded over and slowly atrophied over the course of the following months. Lily seemed a more immediate, and involved, leader to him than Jehane; she had been the one to salvage the Landfall expedition and destroy the ship that he considered the cause of Alsayid’s death. Over that time, the Forlorn Hope had become his home. He had discovered, slowly and with surprise, that he had no great desire to return to a life of mining at Filistia House. The revolution had changed him enough to make such a return difficult.

  So whatever sympathy he felt for Aliasing was tempered by his anger at her for jeopardizing the one future he felt he could look forward to, and by his anger at what her betrayal had done to Jenny. Truth to be told, he was quite happy to see Aliasing go.

  She did not speak to him, gathering up her few possessions. A few tears dappled her cheeks, but that was all. She kept her expression tautly controlled. Followed him meekly to the shuttle bay and boar
ded without incident.

  He watched the dark fall of her hair and the loose swirl of her skirts disappear around a corner of the pressurized tube that led to the shuttle, and then he sealed the hatch and left the four Ridani guards to keep an eye on the bay. He even whistled a little, returning to the upper decks.

  He found the captain in the outer room of her suite. She waved him in, and he sat down beside Flower on the couch. Lily was standing. Her face had a drawn cast to it, as if she had sustained a shock but was trying to conceal, or overcome it.

  “We were discussing the casualties,” she said to Yehoshua. “Flower says that she doesn’t have enough knowledge to help them improve, but that she can maintain their current condition and continue to rehabilitate those who are recovering. The question is whether we should transfer them to Station Hospital on Forsaken or ask the Boukephalos to take them. After all, these are heroes of the engagement at Blessings.”

  “What about Hawk—” Yehoshua began, and stopped, seeing the expression that shuttered the captain’s face. She looked at Flower, as if she could not bring herself to answer the question.

  Flower regarded Yehoshua gravely. “He be gone ya catatonic, min. No telling how or when he might come clear o’ that.”

  “I see,” Yehoshua murmured, not sure he did see. He felt mildly guilty that he had called Hawk a psychopath, and yet vindicated at the same time.

  “There’s no guarantee,” the captain went on, “that they’ll recover in any case.”

  “I’m not sure what other choice we have,” said Yehoshua.

  “Take them with us to League space. Find medical care there. Flower can monitor them so far.”

  “And if they recover in League space, how many will thank us for taking them so far from home?”

  Flower grinned. “Being ya dead be furthest from home I can think on, min. Min Hawk wanted them to go.”

  “Min Hawk,” said the captain tonelessly, “had his own ghosts”—she caught on the word as if she had not meant to say it—“to atone for.”